■'1; 



;»i^^- 












:> 



,0^ ^ 









%^ "'" JT ■■■>. --^ .'> /v^ 












S 






BY ERNEST PEIXOTTO 
Each volume illustrated by the autbor 
THE AMERICAN FHONT 
A REVOLXrriONAKT PILGRIMAGE 
OUR HISPANIC SOUTHWEST 
PACIFIC SHORES FROM PANAMA 
BY ITAUAN SEAS 

THROUGH THE FRENCH PROVIKCES 
ROMANTIC CALIFORNIA 

CHARLES SCRIBNERS SONS 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

















Ruins ill tlu' Main Sciuarr, Frrt'-fii-'ranicnois 



THE 
AMERICAN FRONT 



BY 
ERNEST PEIXOTTO 

CAPTAIN, ENCiKS., V. 8. A. 



ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE AUTHOR 




NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

MCMXIX 



7?^ 



Copyright. 1919, by 
Charles Scribner's Sons 



Published October, 1919 




OCT 2.8 1919 



©C!.A53550T 



/v-\^ 



TO 

THE MEMORY OF 

THE AMERICANS 

•WBOBE GRAVES MARK THE BATTLE-FIELDS OF FRANCE 

THIS BOOK 

IS REVEHENTLT INSCRIBED 



PREFACE 

I HAVE written this book in the form of a personal 
experience, and I hope the reader will pardon me 
if I have dwelt unduly upon the personal note; but 
it seemed to me that a simple eye-witness's account 
of the things that I had seen — many of them of 
exceptional historic interest — would be of value not 
only to those who might write of these events here- 
after, but also to many of the pilgrims who will visit 
the battle-fields of France later on. This sort of 
narrative, too, it seemed to me, was best suited to 
accompany the drawings that I made as literally 
and truthfully as possible, from nature and on the 
spot, and that, I hope, will find their place in the 
iconography of the Great War. Those reproduced 
in this book are but a fraction of the series that I 
made for the War Department, being a choice of 
those best suited to illustrate the text. 

When I reread the pages that I have written I 
realize how much I have left untold — left out for 

[ vii 1 



PREFACE 

fear of tiring the reader, for fear of clouding the 
continuity of my narrative. I have, for example, 
scarcely mentioned the splendid work of the aviators, 
nor have I described the wonders of the S. O. S.: 
the great depots at Is-sur-Tille and Gievres, the 
aviation-fields at Issoudun and Romorantin, the 
locomotive-shops at Montoir and Nevers, the great 
hospitals, the camouflage depot at Dijon, and all 
the other vast American enterprises in France that 
I visited and pictured during the summer of 1918. 

I wish to take this occasion also to thank the 
officers and men who were so kind and helpful to 
me: my chiefs at G. H. Q., the oflficers upon whose 
hospitality I encroached on many an occasion, and 
especially my three comrades whose duties were 
similar to my own, Captains Wallace Morgan, 
Andre Smith, and W. J. Duncan, with one or the 
other of whom I made most of the journeys de- 
scribed in this book. 

E. P. 

Bellevtje (S. et O.) 
May 20, 1919. 



[ viii ] 



CONTENTS 

PAOB 

INTRODUCTORY NOTE xiii 

I. FROM HOBOKEN TO GENERAL HEADQUAR- 
TERS— 

I. Aboard the "Pocahontas" 3 

II. St. Nazaire to Chaumont 16 

n. THE PERIOD OF PREPARATION— 

I, With the Rainbow Division 27 

II. With the Marines Near Verdun .... 43 

III. In German Alsace with the Thirtt-Second . 56 

III. CHATEAU-THIERRY AND THE MARNE— 

I. Belleau Wood 67 

II. Along the Marne and Up to Fismes ... 80 

IV. THE TOUL SECTOR Ill 

V. TAKING THE ST. MIHIEL SALIENT— 

I. Above Les Eparges 125 

II. Into St. Mikiel 134 

in. To THE HiNDENBURG LiNE 145 

[ix] 



CONTENTS 



PAGf 



VI. THE GREAT MEUSE-ARGONNE 0FFENSI\T:— 

I. Before Montfaucox 157 

II. The Road to Varennes 170 

III. The Armistice and Sedan 179 

Vn. WITH THE ARMY OF OCCUPATION— 

I. Into Luxembourg 205 

II. To the Rhine and Beyond 216 



[x] 



• ILLUSTRATIONS 

THE REPRODUCTIONS OF CAPTAIN PEIXOTTO's DRAWINGS ARE 
MADE FROM U. S. OFFICIAL PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE DRAWINGS 

Ruins in the main square, Fere-en-Tardenois .... Frontispiece 

FACING PAGE 

A transport with troops coming through the lock at St. Nazaire 14 

Ships imloading American war material at St. Nazaire ... 18 

Church in Baccarat 30 

A typical village of the Lorraine front in which tlic Ameri«in 

troops were billeted 34 

Church in Badonviller 36 

Barracks at battalion headquarters on the Verdun front held by 

American troops 46 

An American observation-post 52 

The village of Soppe-le-Bas in German Alsace, used as head- 
quarters by a regiment of American infantry 60 

American soldiers billeted in reception-room of an old Benedic- 
tine monastery at Massevaux, in the Toul sector ... 62 

A major's dugout in Belleau Wood 78 

The Marne at Jaulgonne 84 

Charteves 88 

Chateau-Thierry from the terrace of the old chateau .... 90 

The great bridge across the Marne at Chateau-Thierrj' ... 92 

Remains of Vaux 94 

Ruined Torcy 96 

[xi] 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

rAcnro faob 

Village square in Bouresches 98 

The church, Cierges 102 

Reddy Farm on Hill 230 104 

Ruined church at Seriages, overlooking the valley of the Ourcq 106 

The market-place, Fere-en-Tardenois 108 

Billets in a cell of the old monastery of Rangeval 120 

No Man's Land, near Thiaucourt 150 

Great shell-hole near Cierges 176 

The crossroads, Buzancy 190 

Dim-sur-Meuse 206 

Valley of the Alzette, Luxembourg 210 

Men of the 32d Division in the court of the abbey, Echtemach 214 

American trucks in a side-street, Montabaur 218 

The Moselle* at Cochem 220 

First Americans crossing the Rhine 226 

MAPS 

VAai 

Sketch map of the Chateau-Thierry region 81 

Sketch map of the St. Mihiel salient 115 

Sketch map of the Argonne oflFensive 159 



[xiil 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE 

In July, 1914, we had come up from Portugal to 
our studio home near Fontainebleau. On Sunday, 
the 23d, the banks of the Seine at Valvins and 
Samois were gay with summer Hfe. Men and women 
in white were fishing from punts; merry parties 
of young people were rowing or paddling about; 
on terraces along the river, bright with flowers and 
shaded by colored awnings, happy little tea-parties 
assembled, laughing and care-free; soldiers from the 
Forty-Sixth Infantry or the Seventh Dragoons, both 
Fontainebleau regiments, were loitering about out 
on their Sunday leave. 

Then, like a bolt from the blue, the great war- 
cloud swept over Europe, darkening France espe- 
cially with a sense of impending calamity. 

By the following Sunday, the Order of General 
Mobilization had been posted. The river was de- 
serted; not a being was to be seen. The boats lay 
moored to the banks. The gay awnings had dis- 
appeared and even the window-boxes with their 

[ xiii ] 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE 

bright flowers had been taken in. Every shutter was 
drawn; every house closed. Dread and grief were 
already in the air. 

Five days later I joined the local Communal Guard 
and, day or night, patrolled the roads, the fields, 
the woods, the river banks, watching for spies, for 
malefactors, for deserters, with orders to stop and 
question every one. Those were agonizing days 
that lengthened into weeks, lightened at last by the 
Victory of the Marne. 

In October I returned to x\merica and tried to 
content myself by working for various oeuvres. But 
I was not content. My age prevented me from 
entering active service or a training-camp. 

However, in February, 1918, I was offered a 
captain's commission in the Engineers with duty 
as one of the eight artists officially attached to 
the American Expeditionary Forces. This I gladly 
accepted, and on March 4 received telegraphic 
notification of my appointment. 

Ten days later I boarded a transport bound for 
France. 

^Yhat I saw there forms the substance of this 
book. In the performance of my duty I had excep- 

[ xiv ] 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE 

tional opportunities and witnessed portions of all the 
important offensives in which the American Army 
was engaged. I was one of the first Americans to 
enter St. Mihiel. I saw the beginning of the great 
Meuse-Argonne offensive and, with a single com- 
panion, was the first American officer to enter Sedan. 
So I feel that this book should have value as an 
eye-witness's account of certain events that few 
people were permitted to see. 



[xv] 



FROM HOBOKEN TO GENERAL 
HEADQUARTERS 



ABOARD THE 'POCAHONTAS'' 

ONE of the big docks of the Nord-Deutscher 
Lloyd in Hoboken; a rainy, lowery day 
in March, 1918. Two transports lay 
moored at each side of the dock, upon which long 
columns of khaki-clad troops, both colored and 
white, were drawn up, checked off by their officers 
and slowly despatched up the gang-planks aboard 
the gray steamers. 

All officers had been notified to report on board 
before ten o'clock. But the day wore on until late 
afternoon before the last barge-load of barrack-bags 
and the last lot of bedding-rolls had been stowed 
away. Then the hawsers were cast off and we swung 
out into the gray, windy North River, fairly em- 
barked upon our great adventure — the greatest ad- 
venture, I am sure, that any of us aboard, no matter 
what our past experiences, had ever set out upon. 

[3] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

Our voyage was begun when the submarine 
menace was in an acute stage, and every precaution 
was taken from the very outset. No one but the 
sailors (and their naval collars were turned in) was 
allowed on deck as we dropped down the bay, but 
through a port-hole I watched the great buildings 
of the city move slowly by in the twilight, their 
countless windows twinkling with the myriad lights 
of their warm, steam-heated offices. 

It was cold and dark when we reached the outer 
bay, but I could feel other boats about us though 
they showed no lights. There were strange flashes 
every little while wigwagging and blinking like huge 
owl's eyes, while along the horizon, mysterious flares 
appeared from time to time, and beams from search- 
lights lit great circles on the low-lying clouds. 

At dinner we learned that we were aboard the 
transport Pocahontas, formerly the Princess Irene of 
the North German Lloyd fleet. Only one change 
had been made in the dining-room, now the officers' 
mess-room. A portrait of Pocahontas covered some 
decoration too German to be seen with pleasure 
under the circumstances. Though the Kible-silver 
still bore the mark of the well-known German com- 

[4] 



ABOARD THE "POCAHONTAS" 

pany, the men sitting about the tables were totally 
unlike any other transatlantic crowd. Several hun- 
dred army officers gave a dominant note of khaki 
to the white cabin, to which the uniforms of about 
forty naval officers added a darker note. The two 
colors met at the commander's table in the centre 
of the room where the six executive officers of the 
ship sat together. The meal was served very sim- 
ply by a few mess-boys aided by some green (in 
more senses than one) volunteer negro "strikers." 

Our first day out was fine and bright with a brisk 
northwest wind blowing, and the morning sun 
showed us that we were convoyed by a big cruiser 
and accompanied by several other ships, two of 
which were brilliantly camouflaged with the "dazzle 
system." Our own ship presented a busy scene. 
The main-decks were crowded with men in khaki 
and the promenade-deck with officers. A guard of 
seventy men was mounted at eight o'clock. Gun 
crews were polishing and training the six-inch guns 
fore and aft or were at practice loading a dummy 
gun on the forward-deck. 

Though we had more than three thousand men 
aboard, there turned out to be only one senior army 

[5] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

oflBcer on the ship, a major, and of the five captains 
two (mj- friend Wallace Morgan and myself) had 
been commissioned but a fortnight before and had 
had no military experience whatever. 

The inevitable happened. Captain Morgan was 
made officer of the day the very first day out, and 
the same duty devolved upon me a day or two later 
— no fight task for a novice, as there were more than 
forty sentries to be posted, the prisoners to be 
guarded, and no end of regulations to be enforced, 
regulations upon which the very lives of all those 
on board depended. 

After luncheon a meeting of all officers was called, 
and the executive officer of the ship explained the 
"abandon-ship" drill, and an hour later this was 
put into practice for the first time. At the sound- 
ing of a particular bugle-call and the ringing of all 
the ship's gongs, every man aboard was immediately 
to leave whatever duty he might be performing and 
take his appointed place by one of the life-boats or 
rafts. I found myself in command of collapsible 
boat No. 13 next to the ship's bridge. One other 
officer was with me — an alert lieutenant, an orni- 
thologist (the army is made of strange birds) who had 

[6] 



ABOARD THE "POCAHONTAS" 

collected rare specimens in East Africa for the Smith- 
sonian. We had three sailors and twelve soldiers 
with us, the latter mostly big, raw-boned fellows 
from the Kentucky mountains who had never seen 
the sea. The "abandon-ship" drill was repeated 
daily, and later, when in the danger zone, twice a 
day, at most unexpected hours, until, by dint of 
practice, it worked very smoothly and with sur- 
prising rapidity. 

We dined that first night at five o'clock, and after 
dinner all lights were put out and we sat in the 
dark saloon listening to the victrola, the only things 
visible being the wrist-watches of the men and the 
faint luminosity of the port-holes. Every night 
thereafter we groped about the ship in total dark- 
ness, a few carefully screened blue bulbs placed near 
the floor in the corridors being the only lights per- 
mitted. Yet at a meeting of officers held next day 
we were further cautioned against showing lights 
even for an instant. No smoking was permitted on 
deck after dark; all flash-Hghts were delivered up 
to the adjutant until the end of the voyage. But 
the following morning the convoying cruiser sig- 
nalled that she had seen lights in one of the forward 

[7] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

holds, and a further search of the men's quarters 
was made. Other strict orders were rigidly enforced. 
Nothing was to be thrown overboard, not even a 
burnt cigarette or a scrap of paper, for by such bits 
of evidence a submarine could easily trail a ship. 

My turn as officer of the day came on the morrow 
and it became my duty to enforce these rules. 

At eight-fifteen a guard of one hundred and 
thirty-five men was mounted. At ten o'clock I 
accompanied the major commanding troops, the 
ship's doctor, the chief police officer, and an officer 
of the guard on a complete inspection of the ship. 
All the holds were visited; the dark corners of every 
bunk were carefully scrutinized with the aid of a 
flash-light, the doctor even peering under the berths 
in his search for bits of food or sputum. The menace 
of epidemics is ever present on such a voyage and 
absolute cleanliness was exacted. 

Despite its thoroughness, the inspection was rapid 
and businesslike, our spry major leading us briskly 
up and down the forward ladders, through the iron 
bulkhead doors, and down the main hatches into 
the big holds amidships; out through the mess- 
halls and finally into the dark holds aft where the 

[8] 



ABOARD THE "POCAHONTAS" 

colored troops were quartered. In the afternoon 
I made two inspections of all the forty -odd sentry- 
posts, visited the prisoners, and kept a watch gen- 
erally for any evidence of gambling or drinking. 

During the night I made three more rounds and 
these were a strange experience. Forward, in the 
fo'castle, I found the crew sleeping in hammocks 
suspended from the deck above, rolled like cocoons 
in their blankets. In the holds the soldiers* bunks, 
in double tiers, were placed as close together as pos- 
sible, leaving just space enough between for a man 
to pass. From them, as I passed in the darkness, 
an arm, a leg, a foot, or a hand would protrude, inert, 
and in them I caught glimpses, in the ghostly blue 
light, of pale faces turned up, with eyes closed in 
a death-like sleep. 

I questioned the guards at the hatches, at the 
water-butts, and those that watched the big stacks 
of life-belts; I prodded a negro sentry whom sleep 
had overcome. I skidded across the main -deck with 
the rain falUng in torrents and in the darkness could 
make out the submarine watches in their boxes by 
the rail, anxious, alert, and the great, rolling dark 
billows beyond. 

[9] 



THE AMERICAN FROXT 

I admit the dismay I felt — an artist suddenly 
turned soldier, in a uniform scarcely three weeks 
old — at being thus suddenly thrown into a position 
of such responsibiUty, gi^'ing and carrying out orders, 
trying to conceal my real feelings, *' throwing out 
mv chest" as I was ad\'ised to do, and strivini; to 
**look the part" to the grizzled old sergeants. I 
made my last round just before dawn and thank- 
fully turned over the guard at eight-fifteen, taking 
off my web-belt and "gat" for the first time in 
twenty-four hours. 

The high sea was now playing havoc with the men 
and the decks presented a sorry spectacle. At our 
mess the good sailors were chaffing their less for- 
tunate neighbors with such grim jokes as this: 
"Don't worry; you won't be sick coming back: 
you'll be in a wooden kimono." And then to add 
to our comfort we were all ordered to put on our 
life-belts and keep them on. day and night, for the 
remainder of the voyage. They were of a new t^'pe, 
quilted and filled with kapok, with big collars that 
stood hiirh aroimd the neck, so that, arraved in them, 
the officers looked hke stout Sir Walter Raleighs in 
blue corselets with khaki sleeves. 

[10] 



ABOARD THE "POCAHONTAS" 

On the ninth day out the weather changed for 
the better as we entered the danger zone. Early on 
the tenth morning, just as I came on deck, a calm 
clear sunrise revealed a strange object on the horizon 
that I at first mistook for some fishing-smacks. 
As it rapidly approached, however, I realized 
that it was the first of the destroyers that were com- 
ing to meet us and convoy us into port. Then a 
second appeared over our starboard bow and then an- 
other until a dozen of them surrounded us in a wide 
circle, brilliantly camouflaged like wasps, queerly 
striped with black and white, with spots between 
of yellow, gray-blue, and water-green. Like wasps 
too they darted about us, zigzagging across our 
bows, dropping astern, watchful, then, with a burst 
of speed, forging up ahead again. 

At eight o'clock that morning I went on duty a 
second time as oflScer of the day. Toward midday 
the cruiser that had brought us over dropped astern, 
swung about and headed for home alone. Other- 
wise the day passed uneventfully. The sunset was 
beautiful and the moon rose bright and clear. "A 
good night for Fritz," as one of the ship's officers 
put it. Every one was ordered out of the lowest 

[11] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

holds that night as, in case of disaster, it would be 
impossible to empty them quickly enough. So, as 
I went about the decks, in all the protected angles, 
I found soldiers sleeping, wrapped tight in their 
blankets, but shivering, nevertheless, for the head 
wind was bitter cold. 

With the two officers of the guard, I was on deck 
all night. There was a tense feeling on the ship. 
The submarine guards and the watchers in the 
crow's-nests had been doubled. The officers on the 
bridge and the men at the guns stood with the tele- 
phone-receivers fastened to their ears. At four- 
thirty, in the darkness, reveille sounded and we 
went about rousing the sleeping figures on the decks. 
The next hour was the one of greatest danger — the 
hour of dawn. Nothing untoward happened, how- 
ever, so we continued our zigzags, carefully guarded 
by the watchful destroyers. 

That afternoon the convoy split. We headed 
alone toward the northeast, while the other ships 
dropped rapidly off toward the south, toward Bor- 
deaux, as we afterward learned. Three of the de- 
stroyers accompanied us as our escort, and toward 
sunset we slowed down and for two hours zig- 
zagged, waiting. 

[12] 



ABOARD THE "POCAHONTAS" 

The moon came up again clear and almost full, 
*']ike a big plate in the sky," as some one disdain- 
fully remarked, and a better night to "get a tin fish 
in you" could not well be imagined. For a light 
breeze broke the surface of the sea into small choppy 
waves whose shadows were just about the size of a 
submarine, so that, had a U-boat appeared among 
them, the most careful watching would probably 
not have detected it. Just after nightfall, however, 
we started off at top speed for port, making a dash 
for it, and dawn showed a faint streak on the horizon 
which rapidly developed into the bare rocky cliffs 
of Belle-Ile-en-Mer, well-known as the summer 
home of Sarah Bernhardt. We now knew for the 
first time that we were to land at St. Nazaire. 

Two of our destroyers left us and were replaced 
by an aeroplane that hovered vigilant overhead, 
while the single remaining destroyer piloted us up 
the channel. 

Now, with my glasses, I could make out along 
the shore villages and church spires, and then in- 
dividual houses with buff walls and blue-slate roofs 
standing among pines and evergreens — the homes 
of France, so dear to my heart, the homes of the 
people for which all our hearts ached. Then I could 

[13] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

begin to see figures here and there. And then at 
one spot, where a wide green lawn sloped from a 
comfortable dwelling to a white gate by the sea, a 
little girl came running down across the grass and 
out through the gate to the shore, waving as she 
came a bright American flag. And that tiny speck 
upon the shore brought a lump into my throat and 
moistened the eyes of the men about me. Then I 
saw other people waving welcoming hands. 

We took a pilot aboard and entered a lock with 
the big Mongolia ahead of us and the Kroonland 
just passing out — both camouflaged with "low- 
visibility" colors, toned like Monet's pictures with 
spots of pink and green. 

St. Nazaire was not yet bored with the arrival 
of American transports. Far from it. At one side 
of the lock a crowd of ragged urchins scrambled 
for the coppers that the soldiers threw them. At 
the other side a dense crowd stood silent, watching 
our packed decks. Women and children predom- 
inated, many of them in deep mourning. There 
were a few French officers: a captain home on per- 
mission, tenderly holding his daughter as she sat 
upon a wall; a naval officer standing on a balcony 

[14] 



ABOARD THE "POCAHONTAS" 

beside his tired-looking wife. Behind this crowd, 
in motors, sat some stalwart American oflScers, 
bronzed and fit. 

The port clock stood at six as we slowly moved 
into the inner basins, crowded with shipping, and 
tied up at the old wharf of the Compagnie Generale 
Transatlantique. 



15] 



II 
ST. NAZAIRE TO CHAUMONT 

REVEILLE sounded again next morning at 
four-thirty, and promptly at seven o'clock 
' the troops went down the gangways, formed 
upon the dock, and by eight had marched quietly 
away, leaving only about forty casual oflficers on the 
ship. There we were to remain until our orders 
came, our major, however, permitting us to go ashore 
for a while later in the morning. 

So Captain Morgan and I took a walk through 
the town — a rather stupid place as French towns 
go — and out by the sea to the public garden. Here 
we sat for a while in the sunshine — the thin weak 
sun of late March. There was still a distinct chill 
in the air, even on this favored south coast of Brit- 
tany. But the trees were beginning to bud and 
beds of daisies, tulips, and primroses spread their 

[ir>] 



ST. NAZAIRE TO CHAUMONT 

bright colors in the grass. The birds were nesting; 
cats were prowhng and searching their mates around 
the greenhouses, and nature was just waking after 
her long winter's sleep. 

It was only when we listened that the distant 
rumble of thundering lorries and the spluttering of 
side-cars and motorcycles told us that the war was 
real, as they rolled along the roads behind us, hurry- 
ing troops, supplies, and messages to the canton- 
ments back on the hills. 

We were forced to remain in St. Nazaire two days 
longer and, chained to the ship as we were, saw little 
of the town or its activities. Finally our orders 
came. All the officers were directed to proceed at 
once to the casual camp at Blois for assignment to 
duty except three of us who were to go to the En- 
gineer Headquarters at Angers. We made the short 
journey on a dull gray day, and it was a dull gray 
country through which we passed. 

Upon our arrival we reported to the Caserne des 
Jardins, a spacious barracks situated on high ground 
at the outer edge of the town. The court was filled 
with soldiers looking very businesslike in trench 
helmets and going through their gas-mask drill, 

[17] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

some of them representing the waves of gas and 
trying to reach the others before they could properly 
adjust their masks. 

Colonel Black, who was commanding the drill in 
person, greeted us pleasantly, saying, however, that 
he was sorry that he could not "keep us a few days," 
but that our orders had already come. At the ad- 
jutant's we got these orders directing us to proceed 
at once to General Headquarters at Tours. 

There was no train until nightfall, and as Pari- 
sians were flocking to Touraine in great numbers 
to escape the air-raids and the long-range guns, and 
the hotels were overfull, we were advised to wait 
for the morning train. Angers too was overflowing 
with refugees. I talked to a number of them, most 
of whom seemed greatly relieved to be safely out 
of the danger zone. But, in the court of the famous 
old feudal castle, I met an elderly gentleman and 
his charming daughter who treated the subject more 
lightly. He told us indeed of the latest raids, and 
of the bombing of St. Gervais, but he added: "I 
thought it was time to take my daughter away. 
Whenever she heard an alerte, she would go to her 
mirror to arrange her hair instead of descending 

[18] 




Ships Unloading Amrricun War Mat<Tial at St. Nazairc 
Tlic work on tin- dock is Ix'iii^' done !>>■ (Icrman prisoners iiM<lcr- ^'lutnl 



ST. NAZAIRE TO CHAUMONT 

to the cellar where she belonged." And her saucy 
eyes and up tilted nose corroborated his story. 

We left next morning for Tours, reporting there 
at the Hotel Metropole, which was then being used 
as General Headquarters. Here we were at once 
told that our orders should have read not to General 
Headquarters of the Service of Supply at Tours but 
direct to General Headquarters at Chaumont, and 
that we should proceed immediately by the night 
train. 

Indeed, this was good news and I was delighted, 
for the one thing I had dreaded most was a period 
of waiting in some camp or city far from the front. 

I found in the Adjutant-General at Tours an old 
friend, who gave us a letter to the R. T. O., asking 
him to take good care of us. We dined early with 
another friend, a Frenchman born in Touraine but 
now a lieutenant in the American army, and at eight 
o'clock boarded our train — a special from Tours 
direct to Chaumont, reserved exclusively for the use 
of American oflScers and soldiers. We found a com- 
partment kept for us in charge of a colored sergeant 
— a Pullman porter before the war — who tried to 
make us feel "as much like de ole Pullman days as 

[19] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

pos'ble." All he could do, however, was to spread 
out some O. D. blankets on the couchettes, tuck them 
in, and leave us. Early in the morning we passed 
Dijon; saw Langres, perched on its steep hill, a little 
later; and, toward noon, reached our destination. 

Thus I had completed the trip from Hoboken to 
General Headquarters in seventeen days — a pretty 
good record in the army, I thought. 

It was the 1st of April and Easter Sunday, and 
the streets were filled with people coming from 
church, a large proportion of the women in black, 
and practically all the men in horizon-blue or khaki. 
Chaumont {chauve mont — bare hill), perched on an 
eminence, is a gray old town with stone-paved streets 
and some fine bits of architecture among its venerable 
houses. But, scarcely noticing the town, we walked 
quickly out through the crooked Rue de Bruxereuilles 
to a modest public garden beyond which lies an 
irregular-shaped open square. Here the rattle of 
a sentry's gun as he presented arms drew our at- 
tention to a large house whose high-pitched blue- 
slate roofs rose prominently behind a stone wall — 
the residence at that time of the American Com- 
mander-in-Chief. 

Beyond it a broad avenue, shaded by a quad- 

[20] 



ST. NAZAIRE TO CHAUMONT 

ruple row of trees, led off to the edge of the town. 
To the left, some little distance away, stood a bar- 
racks, a typical specimen of such buildings in France. 
A spacious rectangular court preceded it, shut off 
from the road by a plain iron grill, above whose 
gates the French and American flags flew side by 
side. This court was surrounded by stone barracks 
buildings, three stories high, devoid of all architec- 
tural embellishment, with long rows of evenly spaced 
windows surmounted by red mansard roofs. These 
simple buildings were the General Headquarters of 
the American Expeditionary Forces. 

Their interiors were equally plain and businesslike. 
Corridors with whitewashed walls, red-tiled floors, and 
wooden stairways led from one bare room to an- 
other, and these bare rooms were furnished in the 
simplest manner with deal tables, a few straw-bot- 
tomed chairs, a good desk or two, and a red-hot iron 
stove. Great maps, carefully marked and pasted to- 
gether, covered the walls. In outer offices sergeants, 
field-clerks, and junior officers attended to routine 
work; in inner rooms majors, colonels, and generals 
directed the policy of the A. E. F. and decided and 
put through matters of importance. 

Upon my first visit, I entered the centre door of 

[21] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

the main building, climbed one flight of stairs, and 
turned down a corridor toward the office I was seek- 
ing, when, as I passed a door like all the others, my 
heart jumped as I read, printed upon it in black 
on a plain square of white paper: 

GENERAL PERSHING 



I was in and out of headquarters a number of 
times within the next few days. An oflScial artist 
was a strange bird to classify in the army but, after 
some deliberation, it was finally decided to attach 
us to G 2-D, one of the branches of the Intelligence, 
and we were asked to suggest under what conditions 
we thought we could best accomplish our work. 

It was further decided that we should take station 
in Neufchateau, a town to the north of Chaumont 
about an hour's ride by motor, hence that much 
nearer the front. 

Neufchateau is well-known to most oflBcers who 
did field service in the A. E. F., for nearly every 
one passed through it on his way to or from the 
American front. WTien first we went there, it was 
Headquarters of the First Army Corps. Later the 

[22] 



ST. NAZAIRE TO CHAUMONT 

First Army was organized in it, and finally it be- 
came Advance Headquarters of the S. O. S. Hence 
it was always crowded with ofiicers, who gathered 
toward evening in the Club Lafayette for dinner 
and a smoke afterward in the cafe. So, from Neuf- 
chateau as our base, we prepared to set out for the 
various sectors in which our troops were gathered. 



[23] 



II 

THE PERIOD OF PREPARATION 



I 
WITH THE RAINBOW DIVISION 

MY first trips to the American front were 
made in April and May, 1918. The re- 
doubted German spring offensive had been 
launched and was pitilessly biting its way into the 
Allied lines. But, with the single exception of the 
First that was up near Cantigny, no American divi- 
sions were as yet engaged in action. Most of them 
were still in training in back areas or were holding 
certain quiet sectors while they learned the intrica- 
cies of trench warfare, and released veteran French 
divisions for combat. 

The Second Division, the Marines, were in the 
trenches east of Verdun; the Twenty-Sixth was in 
the Toul sector; the Forty-Second in the Vosges, 
and toward the middle of May the Thirty-Second 
moved into Alsace. 

It was now my purpose to visit each of these sec- 

[27] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

tors. We official artists, as we were called, had 
meanwhile been given our papers, which allowed us 
the greatest freedom of action. They were signed 
by the chief of our section at G. H. Q., and their 
second and third paragraphs read: 

"You are authorized to make sketches and paint- 
ings anywhere within the Zone of the American Army 
in accordance with instructions already given you. 

"It is the wish of the Commander-in-Chief that 
all commanding officers extend to you all possible 
assistance in the carrying out of your orders." 

As only three of us had as yet arrived, our de- 
cisions were easily made, and we chose, for our first 
experience, the area occupied by the Forty-Second, 
the Rainbow Division, composed, as every one 
knows, of National Guard elements from many 
different States, whence its name. 

So, on the 20th of April, we left Chaumont, 
heading direct for Nancy, scarcely noting anything 
on the way, so eager were we to get up to the front. 
But, at the top of the hill beyond Pont St. Vincent, 
we did pause to enjoy the view of the fair capital of 
Lorraine lying spread out beneath us, with its 
crowded red roofs, its towers, spires, and high church 

[28] 



WITH THE RAINBOW DIVISION 

gables in the centre and, radiating from them, long 
streets, bordered with houses, reaching out like 
tentacles to vassal villages that lay about it. Seen 
from this hilltop, the city looked quite intact, and 
even as we speeded through its silent streets with 
their doors barricaded and shutters tightly drawn 
there was little evidence of destruction. 

This impression we modified later, upon our re- 
turn. But for the present we turned out quickly 
upon the highroad to Luneville. The tall towers 
of the church at St. Nicolas-du-Port, one of the 
finest in Lorraine and hallowed with memories of 
Jeanne d'Arc, soon rose against the sky. Then we 
threaded streets bordered with workmen's houses 
that led to Varangeville and Dombasle, centres of 
the great salt-mines and other industries of the 
Meurthe-et-Moselle. These towns, as well as Lune- 
ville, through which we now passed, were full of 
French soldiers, for we were running practically 
parallel with the front, though at some little dis- 
tance behind it. 

But at Azerailles the men's uniforms changed 
from horizon-blue to khaki as we entered the zone 
held by our troops. Soon after, toward six o'clock, 

[29] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

we reached Baccarat, then and long after an im- 
portant Division Headquarters of the American 
army, and reported at once to the Chief of Staff. 

I was assigned to a billet in a house near the rail- 
road-station, and on my way to it found the streets 
filled with our soldiers, lined up before the com- 
missary, talking in groups on the corners, listening 
to the band that was playing in the court of the 
hospital, while heavy trucks, ambulances, and long 
wagon-trains went rattling over the rough paving- 
stones. 

Baccarat before the war had been a town of 
some importance. In the very first onrush the 
Germans thrust through it, and when they were 
driven back again, the bridge over the Meurthe was 
blown up and the faubourg beyond it reduced to 
ruins. During this short occupation the house in 
which I was billeted was used by the German general 
as his headquarters. Its owner, an elderly lady, 
remained in it and still occupied it when I was there. 

She told me her story — how like, alas, so many 
that I afterward heard. In a large outhouse beyond 
the rear court she employed many women making 
the embroideries for which the country hereabouts 

[30] 




Clinrcli ill liiic<;irat 



WITH THE RAINBOW DIVISION 

is quite famous. When the Germans came they 
seized the entire stock, some two hundred thousand 
francs' worth, and made off with it. Later, when 
they were driven out of the town, they took, for 
the women who had come with them, all her 
valuables — jewelry, furs, silverware, etc. — loaded 
them in trucks with all the linen and blankets and 
left, whence her apologies to me for the poor bed- 
ding that was all that she could offer me. 

On the following day, in the late afternoon, as 
I was sketching among the ruins across the river, 
I saw a band and a camion standing in front of the 
hospital behind the church, and, presently, as the 
band began to play a funeral march, I realized that, 
for the first time, I was to see an American soldier 
buried in France. So, as the slow-moving cortege 
came along, I joined in behind. 

The band marched at the head followed by a 
firing-squad of sixteen ; then an army chaplain walked 
in front of a motor-truck with three jjall-bearers at 
each side, and its canvas flaps turned back enough 
to disclose the coffin covered by a new American 
flag. Behind it marched a lieutenant and the men 
of the platoon to which the soldier had belonged — 

[31] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

a victim to duty, killed, I was afterward told, in a 
hand-grenade accident. 

Slowly the little procession passed the church, 
ascended the hill, and turned out into the open fields 
beyond. Two thin lines of bare trees bordered the 
muddy road; a sombre sky hung leaden overhead 
and a drizzling rain was falling. The hills fell away 
to the right, and in the valley the town was visible, 
backed by the hills near Raon I'Etape, still pow- 
dered with the last of the winter's snows. The boom 
of the cannon off at the front came frequently to 
our ears, punctuating the music and the roll of the 
muffled drums. Three women in deep black had 
joined the procession, weeping bitterly. 

As it topped a final rise, a military graveyard 
came into view, its high gray crosses so close together 
that they formed a solid phalanx. At the inter- 
section of each a tricolored cockade was placed, and 
these, from a distance, in the uncertain light, looked 
like the faces of spectres that, silent, mysterious, 
stood with outstretched arms awaiting the arrival 
of their newest companion — a weird, uncanny spec- 
tacle that sent a shiver up the spine. Above them, 
as if borne aloft in their hands, rose double crosses 

[32] 



WITH THE RAINBOW DIVISION 

of Lorraine made of boughs, and over the rustic 
entrance of the cemetery appeared the words: 

MORTS POUR LA FRANCE 

A grave-digger, with his sabots and corduroys 
stained with new red earth, stood by a fresh-dug 
grave in a corner reserved for Americans. The coffin 
was carried to the edge of the grave, the firing-squad 
took its position; the chaplain's droning voice in- 
toned the simple service, punctuated at intervals by 
the sound of the distant guns; the three volleys rang 
out in the stillness; then "taps." And then, from 
a little copse beyond, a second bugle, clear and strong, 
a perfect echo of the first, sounded "taps" again, 
like the voice of resurrection ! How lonely, how 
desolate it seemed to be buried in this far corner 
of a foreign land ! How often thereafter was I to 
witness this same scene and hear the three volleys 
in the afternoon stillness ! 

We decided to go next day as far out into the 
trenches as our superior officers would permit us, 
so started by the main road to Raon I'Etape, turn- 
ing off there toward the Alsatian border, eastward, 

[33 1 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

through a succession of villages filled with Amer- 
ican troops. 

This was my first glimpse of them in their billets, 
so I noted their surroundings with interest. The 
towns in this part of Lorraine are very primitive. 
The church forms the focal point, from which a 
few muddy streets radiate, there being usually one 
long street traversing the town from end to end in 
the general direction of the highway. Manure piles, 
placed in front of most of the houses, drain them- 
selves into the open gutters of the roadways, so that, 
especially in the spring and autumn, these are grimy 
and slippery with malodorous mud. 

A few maisons bourgeoises are grouped in the 
centre of the town, but most of the houses are of a 
very simple type and quite alike, one to another. 
Their plain fronts are divided into halves. One 
half constitutes the dwelling proper, two stories 
high, with a door and two windows below and three 
windows above. The other half is a sort of stable 
and barn combined, entered through a big doorway, 
wide and high enough to admit a large farm-wagon. 
In these barns, for the most part, our men were 
billeted, twenty to fifty in each, rolled at night in 

[34] 



WITH THE RAINBOW DIVISION 

their O. D. blankets, sleeping in the straw. Field- 
kitchens were also sheltered under these big door- 
ways, and before them the dough-boys lined up for 
mess. 

In the streets, round the pumps and stone horse- 
troughs, the men were continually washing in the 
running water, though the air was still nipping and 
frosty — brushing their teeth, soaping their hair, 
their arms, their necks; shaving before their little 
steel mirrors or bits of broken glass; washing the 
cakes of sticky mud from their rubber boots — in 
short, striving against all obstacles to keep clean. 

Dressed in their khaki uniforms they looked 
strangely ahke, emanating a powerful impression of 
ruddy, clean-shaven youth; of lithe, athletic bodies 
with strong, clean hmbs — the only really youthful 
army in the field in 1918. 

And I noted then, as I did repeatedly thereafter, 
their good humor, their constant cheerfulness, their 
boyish healthy pleasures, joking, "scrapping"; teas- 
ing the old peasant women who could not under- 
stand them; sitting toward evening with the girls 
upon the doorsteps. 

Neufmaisons was a typical village of this type, 

[35] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

and later on we spent a day there sketching. But 
this first morning we pushed on as far as Pexonne, 
reporting there to regimental headquarters, where, 
owing to the poor visibility — it was a foggy, rainy 
day — we were allowed to proceed to Badonviller. 
The road was camouflaged and pitted with shell- 
holes. The houses along it were mere ruins. The 
big guns now and then sounded unpleasantly near. 

Badonviller was in ruins, for it had been in the 
front line since the beginning of the war. When 
our troops moved in a few weeks before, the Ger- 
mans, of course, knew all about it and gave them 
a hot welcome. The town bore unmistakable evi- 
dence of this last bombardment, and our men were 
busily engaged clearing away debris of all descrip- 
tions. 

Everybody was living in dugouts. Some of these 
had been made quite comfortable with easy chairs, 
mirrors, bureaus, and other furniture borrowed from 
the rooms above. We lunched at the major's mess, 
and listened to tales of recent raids told by the young 
scout lieutenants. 

Afterward we were taken out into the trenches, 
each accompanied by a runner, who acted as guide 

[36] 




X ^ VeN^^V^t>' 



Cliurch in BadoiivilkT 



WITH THE RAINBOW DIVISION 

and orderly. In this quiet sector, this our first visit 
to the trenches was not as thrilling as we had ex- 
pected, as, beyond the trenches themselves, with 
their duck-walks, fire-steps, sand-bags, and care- 
fully braided revetments, there was little to be seen. 

That night, in the Officers' Club in Baccarat, I 
met a friend. Major Tracy of the Camouflage, with 
a couple of his coadjutors, and it was a fortunate 
meeting, for during the next few days they guided 
us about, showing us things we might not otherwise 
have seen until much later on. 

We visited the big gun emplacements near Re- 
herry, where the old "Fighting Sixty-Ninth," now 
the 165th Infantry, was quartered, and saw three 
eight-inch howitzers hidden in an apple-orchard 
and so well camouflaged with nettings that at a 
distance of a hundred yards it was impossible to 
detect them; we skidded through the slimy mud 
to a battery of 75s, and watched their lieutenant 
sodding the top of his dugout, which he did so care- 
fully that, when he had finished, the most perfect 
aerial photograph could not have revealed its pres- 
ence; then listened to him as he discoursed upon 
the merits of his guns, clean, glittering, and spotless 

[37] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

in spite of the mud, accompanying his explanations 
with the loving caresses of a father showing a 
favorite child. 

Another day, with three artillery officers, we went 
well up to some advanced positions beyond Pexonne 
to see a battery of 75s buried underground in 
dugouts scooped in a hillside. ^\Tiile I was busily 
sketching their rabbit-warren, I scarcely noted the 
brown smoke-puffs of shrapnel that kept bursting 
nearer and nearer, until I saw a lieutenant's head 
appear from a dugout and heard his voice calling: 
"Come in out of that, captain; that's a very un- 
healthy spot just now; they're trying to get our 
range. ..." 

One evening I attended a "show" given by the 
men of the French division upon our right. The 
theatre, though capable of holding more than a 
thousand people, was packed to the doors. There 
was a sprinkling of women and tradesmen from the 
town, but the vast majority of the audience was 
military — row upon row of officers in blue or khaki 
down-stairs, and soldiers packing the galleries or 
standing at the back as on a Caruso night at the 
Opera. 

[38] 



WITH THE RAINBOW DIVISION 

Near the stage the gold oak-leaves on a French 
general's hat sparkled conspicuously as he stood, 
surrounded by his staff, awaiting the arrival of our 
general, who came in just before the curtain rose. A 
band played exhilarating marches, and was replaced 
for the incidental music and accompaniments by a 
string orchestra also made up of soldiers. 

The ''stunts" were varied and amusing, some of 
the performers being quite well-known in the Paris 
music-halls. There were the heroic recitations and 
sentimental songs dear to the French heart; there 
were comics whose songs were full of Gallic license; 
there were fearful females fresh from the trenches, 
with blonde hair and painted lips, who displayed 
their silk stockings and lingerie with startling 
abandon; there were saynettes and bits of tragedy, 
and it was long after midnight when we groped our 
way home in the darkness — to be awakened at day- 
break by the antiaircraft guns. 

After a five days' stay in the sector we started 
back to Chaumont. As we entered Luneville a 
French infantry regiment was coming through and 
we stopped to watch it go by. How fine they looked, 
these weather-beaten veterans in gray steel helmets, 

[39] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

carrying their full marching equipment, and swing- 
ing along to the "Sambre et Meuse," with their 
guns held so high that, with the thin murderous 
bayonet that topped them, the narrow street fairly 
bristled with them, like the tall pikes of ancient 
men-at-arms. 

Farther on in the town we stopped to see the 
palace that Stanislas, ex-King of Poland, father 
of Marie Leszinska, built as his Versailles, a vast, 
pompous pile of masonry that has long been used 
as a cavalry headquarters, residence of some well- 
known general who commanded a crack division, 
which, like the famous division de fer of Nancy, as- 
sured the defense of the frontier. In the centre of its 
great forecourt, bestriding a rampant charger, stands 
a theatrical statue of Lasalle, "le beau sabreur,'^ 
the gallant young general of cavaliers legers, those 
winged couriers of the battle-field that once were 
the heroes of the fight, but are now replaced by real 
winged messengers, the Guynemers and Foncks of 
the aviation. 

We reached Nancy by noon and decided to stop 
and spend the night so as to see the condition of 
the city. We first turned into the Place Stanislas 
and found its smart majesty quite intact. Not one 

[40] 



WITH titp: rainbow division 

of Here's edifices that surround it had been touched 
and even Lamour's beautiful grills, superbly wrought 
and gilded, that have served as models for the iron- 
work of many an American millionaire's palace 
(without his knowing it), remained uninjured along 
one side of it and up the Place de la Carriere be- 
yond. In the gardens of the Pcpiniere, shaded by 
ash, aspens, and stately elms, a band was playing 
to a Sunday crowd, and all seemed strangely normal 
and peaceful. 

But when we went to see the ducal palace we 
found its Gothic Grande Porterie completely bar- 
ricaded and the tombs of the dukes in the Church 
of the Cordeliers adjoining buried under moun- 
tains of sand-bags. The Porte Desilles at the end 
of the Cours Leopold took on a new interest, for, 
built in 1785, was it not designed to commemorate 
as well as the birth of the Dauphin the alliance 
of France with the United States? 

Half a century ago Nancy, though the intellec- 
tual centre of eastern France with a famed university 
and scientific schools, counted only fifty thousand 
inhabitants. But after the War of 1870 it grew 
rapidly, many of the citizens of Metz and Stras- 
bourg, unwilling to live under German rule, emigrat- 

[41 1 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

ing to it and helping to develop its many industries, 
which, owing to its situation at the junction of a 
system of canals that connect it with the Rhine, 
Saone, Rhone, Meuse, and Marne, became quite 
important. Thus, in 1914, Nancy had become a 
thriving city of a hundred and twenty thousand in- 
habitants, a large proportion of whom lived in the 
newer quarters that sprang up around the Place 
Thiers. 

It was up in these newer quarters around the 
railroad-station that most of the damage from air- 
raids was done. Every house-front up there was 
spattered with the marks of high explosives. Every 
window was glassless and most of the buildings had 
yawning breaches in their facades. Even many of 
those that from the exterior looked quite intact 
were mere ruins within. One big group of buildings 
had just been bombed a night or two before and 
lay disembowelled like a poor picador's horse, with 
its entrails — timbers, stone, furniture, laths, and 
plaster — dragging in the street. Of the hundred 
and twenty thousand inhabitants, only forty thou- 
sand had been able to hold out during the one hun- 
dred and eighty raids ! 

[42] 



II 

WITH THE MARINES NEAR 
VERDUN 

THE jBrst time I saw the Marines was on top 
of the Cotes de Meuse, where they were 
having their first experience in the trenches. 
We had left Neufchateau early, passing through 
Gondrecourt and Ligny on the way, and had lunched 
at the big Popotte des Officiers, a French mess in 
the busy Ville Basse at Bar-le-Duc. We had taken 
no time to visit the picturesque Ville Haute — an- 
cient residence of the Dukes of Bar — but had pushed 
straight on via Vavincourt to Souilly. 

In the broad main street of Souilly there were 
few soldiers, but, on the other hand, before the doors 
of its stone houses there were many sentries, so we 
easily guessed it to be, as it was, a very important 
French Corps headquarters. At one crossroads we 
were saluted by no less than four sentries: an 

[43] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

American M. P., an Italian carahiniero, a poilu, and 
a chasseur alpin. 

Beyond Souilly the road was full of movement. 
American artillery trains were coming down and 
with them long strings of motor-trucks loaded with 
Marines, thundering along at top speed until the 
earth fairly trembled with them. Then we began 
to pass regiments of chasseurs alpins marching up, 
and we realized that a relief was going on. Between 
Ancemont and Dieue we crossed the marshes of the 
Meuse and soon arrived at Sommedieue. 

Here the streets and the place, camouflaged with 
long strips of burlaps hung across it en echelon, were 
swarming with soldiery. The dark-blue chasseurs 
were massing at one end, getting ready for billeting. 
Our Marines, in olive-green, were gathered over by 
the river, washing, shaving, scrubbing in their efforts 
to get clean after their stay in the trenches. Superb 
fellows they were, these *' leather-necks," these 
*' hard-boiled guys," as they liked to call themselves, 
who were so soon to become famous at Belleau Wood 
— ^fit comrades for the renowned "blue devils" of 
France who were gathering to relieve them. 

We left our car in the square, walked out over 

[44 1 



WITH THE MARINES NEAR VERDUN 

the river and beyond the last house in the village, 
and I, for one, wondered whither we were going, 
when our guide turned up into a dense grove of ever- 
greens. There, hidden securely away among the 
pine-trees and further artfully concealed with a 
natural camouflage, we found Division Headquarters 
in a group of wooden huts that looked like a camp 
in California. 

The Chief of Staff greeted us dubiously, explaining 
that the division was "on the move," and that he 
did not know whether we could go up or not. But, 
after telephoning to Brigade Headquarters, he gave 
us permission to proceed. So, returning to our car, 
we motored out through the Forest of Amblonville 
to a big main road — the national highway from 
Verdun to Metz — and I read upon a milestone: "Ver- 
dun, 11 kilometres." Beyond the famous Fort du 
Rozellier, that bars this important road, we turned 
into the woods again and found, as at Sommedieue, 
Brigade Headquarters cunningly concealed in a 
dense forest. 

The general's aide-de-camp received us and, as 
we finished washing up after our long ride, told us 
that the general would like to see us. We found 

[45] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

him waiting outside the hut — General Harbord, 
then a brigadier just up from G. H. Q., where he 
had been Adjutant-General, a handsome figure of a 
soldier, dressed with such great care that, in this 
country' of sticky mud, I have never forgotten his 
immaculate riding-boots. He explained that he 
could not keep us at headquarters that night, but 
would send us up in his car to a battalion head- 
quarters in a part of the line that he thought very 
interesting. 

A few miles' ride along a camouflaged road brought 
us to a point at the bottom of a hill where we were 
told that the motor could go no farther. So, getting 
out, we walked on until we found, hidden away in 
an abandoned quarry, some barracks and magazines 
buried under row upon row of sand-bags. The of- 
ficers' quarters in another quarry farther on con- 
sisted of a number of tiny chambers dug in the solid 
earth and faced up with stone, a high talus pro- 
tecting their doors and windows from flying shell 
fragments. The battalion commander. Major Sibley, 
greeted us most cordially, had some supper reheated 
for us (it was long after mess-time), and then sent 
us in care of a lieutenant down into the trenches. 

[46] 



WITH THE MARINES NEAR VERDUN 

Battalion headquarters were on the top of the 
Cotes or Hants de Meuse, a long line of flat-topped 
hills that dominate the Woevre. The main high- 
way from Verdun to Metz intersects these hills by 
taking advantage of a cleft between two of them. 
About midway down the slope there stood a village, 
Haudiomont, now but a few crumbling walls, and 
around this village our first-line trenches bent. Two 
companies of the Sixth Marines were holding these 
trenches, and I was to stay with one company 
commander while my companion stayed with the 
other. 

Our guide led us down the hill through the com- 
municating trenches that wriggled and doubled on 
each other — boyaux, as the French call them — 
filled with argillaceous mud, ankle-deep, squashy, 
red, and so slippery that it was a constant effort 
to keep one's feet. Sometimes there were duck- 
walks, and then the going was better. At last we 
reached Haudiomont, or, more exactly, an outlying 
group of its buildings, now mere fragments of walls 
cutting shapeless silhouettes against the sky. 

Here I decided to stay with Lieutenant Noble, 
who, though but twenty-four, was commanding a 

[47] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

company of two hundred and ninety men, a company 
that specially distinguished itself at Belleau Wood. 
He proposed a walk before dark, and, looking criti- 
cally at my shoes, which were very stout ones, said : 
"Those won't do; you'd better let me fit you out 
with rubber boots." WTien I had put these on, 
with my *'tin hat," mj' gas-mask at the "alert," 
and my trench cane, I started on my first real tour 
of the trenches. 

The men, as we passed, stood flattened against 
the platted revetments, watching. Ever^'^ little 
while the pap-pap-paf of a machine-gun sounded 
startlingly close, for the Boche trenches at certain 
points were only a hundred yards away, and at others 
were even connected with ours by bits of abandoned 
boyauXy now choked with barbed wire. Thus we 
slowly made our round of the little sector held by 
Lieutenant Noble's company, he meanwhile taking 
careful note of everything — machine-guns, auto- 
matics, rockets, hand-grenades, having some of the 
latter thrown so as to test them. Here and there 
a ruined bit of wall appeared above the parapet — all 
that remained of some peasant's comfortable home. 

Finally we reached the farthest outpost near what 

[48] 



WITH THE MARINES NEAR VERDUN 

had been the railroad-station with the Hotel de la 
Gare opposite. Here, I was told, the raids usually 
came in, and as the machine-guns rattled my com- 
panion remarked: "They're at it early to-night; 
I wonder if there's something doing." We then 
began our trip back, crossing under the Metz road 
by a tunnel, seeing some strongholds organized in 
the houses that once bordered the road — chouses 
that still bore the livid marks of liquid fire burned 
upon their faces from the last attack, and ended our 
tour at Lieutenant Noble's dugout. 

This dugout was in a small cellar. A door ripped 
from some old Brittany armoire closed its entrance, 
over which an army blanket also hung, so that, when 
the door opened, no streak of light could be seen. 
The chief piece of furniture was a large square table 
on which were spread maps, photographs, and papers. 
A fat, short candle sputtered on a bit of wood that 
did duty as a candlestick. A rude chair, a mirror, 
a primitive fireplace made of a few bricks, and a 
soldier's bed made of a few boards, chicken-wire, 
and straw, completed its furnishings. My host 
took his place by the table and told me to take what 
comfort I could out of the bed, adding: 

[49] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

"I'm going to let you live my life to-night just 
as I live it. I'll show you the orders as they come 
in, and you can see what a company commander's 
night is like in the trenches." 

So, as the orderlies and runners came in with their 
despatches, he showed these to me: an important 
change in orders for rockets and signals to go into 
effect at once; orders for marching on the morrow 
and what to carry; the Intelligence report for the 
day; company papers to sign, etc. At times, as 
the door opened, the bright white light of flares, 
more brilliant than any moonlight, lit up the walls 
outside; and everj^ little while I went outdoors to 
watch these flares and star-shells illuminate the dead 
expanse of No Man's Land. Volleys from machine- 
guns, sharp and sudden and short rattling barrages 
from the 75s kept up an intermittent racket. At 
midnight an orderly appeared, lit a smoky fire, and 
brought in a hot supper — the principal meal in the 
trenches, for only at night can cooking be done — a 
steaming bowl of soup full of meat and vegetables, 
canned peas, a cup of chocolate, and thick slabs of 
buttered bread — ^a very substantial meal. 

I was especially anxious to see dawn break over 

[50] 



WITH THE MARINES NEAR VERDUN 

No Man's Land, so had arranged to have a runner 
come for me at 3 a. m. and take me to an observa- 
tion-post. He arrived upon the minute and led 
me off in the same general direction I had taken 
the night before, his gun with its fixed bayonet catch- 
ing a glint of light now and then. It was still so 
dark that the men could just be seen standing on 
the fire-steps peering into the night. Suddenly a 
gun went off quite near me; then others up and 
down our line. Rifle-shots are contagious in the 
night. Why did he shoot.'* He thought he saw 
something moving in the darkness. 

We reached a ruined building where, I was told, 
there was an observation-post up sufficiently high 
to command an extended view. I climbed some 
rickety steps and found myself on a broken flooring 
with a few roof -beams overhead, between which I 
could see the stars. One corner of the ruined walls 
was screened off with some old cloths and blankets. 
Inside this enclosure I found a chink in the wall, 
the blankets being hung so as to prevent light from 
showing behind this chink. 

With my eye glued to this loophole, I peered out 
into the darkness. The first streaks of dawn soon 

[51] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

came, and revealed the smashed timbers of the rail- 
road-station and crumbling walls of the Hotel de 
la Gare quite near. A blasted tree or two still stood, 
sentinel-like, along the white road to Metz. The 
fields — if fields they could be called — beyond were 
pitted and pockmarked with shell-holes, and just 
below me, in the immediate foreground, was a vast 
tangle of barbed wire, torn and twisted into perfect 
thickets, among which I could distinguish, here 
and there, the braided revetments of our trenches. 
Along the nearer edge of the wooded hill beyond 
lay the German first-line outposts. 

The sharp morning air was cold and still, and 
in this stillness I heard a cough — for every sound 
was audible — then the tac-tac-tac of a machine- 
gun; then silence again. And then, as the day bright- 
ened, the birds awoke and filled the silent waste 
with the carol of their voices. A gray cat climbed 
softly down a fallen beam below me hunting for 
his breakfast. Then came the sound of low voices 
quite near and, though I could hear no words, the 
familiar American twang sounded strangely out of 
place in these surroundings. 

The machine-guns were now actively astir again 

[5^2 1 




An American Ohscrvat ion-Post 

In llu' former village of Haiulioniont. on the front line near Verdun, overlooking the roail 

to Metz 



WITH THE MARINES NEAR VERDUN 

and occasionally the 75s awoke the echoes. The 
sun rose in a cloudless sky, and the mystery, the 
witchery, the dread of the night were gone. 

I climbed back to headquarters through the 
viscous mud that glued to my boots at every step 
until my feet became enormous and heavy as lead. 
Then walked six kilometres back to Brigade Head- 
quarters, admonished as I departed to "keep over 
to the left behind the camouflage, for otherwise 
remember you are under observation." I lunched 
at the general's mess and, as we were finishing, the 
French liaison officer, who had made the entire Ver- 
dun campaign, proposed that we motor over to those 
historic fields. 

It was but a short ride. We soon left the friendly 
cover of the woods and came out into the utter 
desolation of the Verdun hills. There we got out 
and began to walk. 

As we advanced the spectacle was terrifying. 
Shell-hole overlapped shell -crater; the earth was 
ploughed and torn, blown up and smashed down 
again. Every step was a pitfall. Weapons of every 
description, grenades, canteens, shells, casques, ac- 
coutrements, bits of uniforms stained with a putrid 

[53] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

red-browTi varnish, and in certain shell-holes 
whitening bones sticking out of the stinking water, 
and in one a boot floating with a foot still in 
it. Though it was Maytime, the only vestige of 
green that Nature could bestow was a few blades of 
grass on the edges of the new craters. 

"Do you know where you are?" asked the 
French officer. *'No.^ You're in the village of 
Fleury.'* 

I had already seen a few ruined villages, and I 
have seen many since, but few have I beheld ruined 
as Fleury was ruined. Usually a bit of the solid 
masonry of a church is left, or a few segments of 
wall or a road that was once a street, but here at 
Fleury no trace of a town remained; not a gate nor 
a doorway nor a bit of broken wall rose above the 
utter desolation. Nothing but stones and bits of 
furniture; beams and broken household utensils, 
like the debris that accumulates in vacant lots on 
the outskirts of great cities. 

And when I raised my eyes to the far horizon 
the spectacle was everywhere the same. Not a tree; 
not a green thing. Hills as bare as the palm of your 
hand. T\Tiere once had been orchards, vineyards, 

[54] 



WITH THE MARINES NEAR VERDUN 

and well-kept woods, now were lunar solitudes, 
vast stretches of desert, utterly devoid of life. 

Not utterly, however, for down in a hollow I 
saw the fierce tongues of batteries and heard the 
roar of their voices and I knew that, hidden away 
in the bowels of the earth, in great excavations, 
men were hiding. Off to the north rose Douaumont 
and to the eastward Vaux, for we were standing 
just where the last German waves had beat them- 
selves in vain against the adamantine ring of outer 
fortresses. 

And toward the southward I could see a citadel, 
two spires, some gaping roofs, and chimneys without 
smoke — ^Verdun, the City Impregnable, whose name 
will go down through the ages linked with the 
greatest battle in history. 



[55] 



m 

IN GERMAN ALSACE WITH THE 
THIRTY- SECOND 

IN the beginning of May, I heard, through a 
friend attached to G 2 of the First Army Corps, 
that one of our divisions was going into hne 
down in German Alsace near the Swiss border, in 
a sector that the French had conquered in the be- 
ginning of the war and had held ever since. I spoke 
of this to my chief at G. H. Q., and he promised to 
get me down there — a promise he kept so well that, 
a few days later, he took me down himself in a big 
Cadillac. 

I look back upon this trip as something in the 
nature of an excursion. We started on a beautiful 
May morning, the air clear and crisp; the sun, for 
the first time, was bright and warm; the hills and fields 
clothed with their new spring dress. One by one 
the towns went flying by: Mirecourt, headquarters 

[56] 



IN GERMAN ALSACE 

of gallant General Castelnau; Epinal, with its 
memories of the images dear to every French child's 
heart; Remiremont, set in its ring of verdant hills. 
No sign of war was anywhere in evidence save, here 
and there in the villages, groups of soldiers in hori- 
zon-blue en repos. 

At Le Thillot we chose the short and steep road 
over the mountains via the Ballon d'Alsace, one 
of the most famous view-points in the Vosges, A 
series of sharp zigzags soon brought us well above 
the valleys until these lay spread out beneath us 
like colored contour maps, and then were blotted 
out by forests of evergreens where woodmen with 
their oxen were hauling logs or patiently stacking 
cord-wood in neat graded piles along the roadside. 
The road became steeper. Our powerful engine 
snorted but took the hills easily. The woods opened 
and barren uplands appeared. 

A sentry at a barrier stopped us to inspect our 
magic pink headquarters pass just as we reached 
the highest point of the road. The colonel proposed 
a climb to La Vierge, a huge figure of the Virgin 
that tops the Ballon d'Alsace. He set off at a great 
pace, climbing around the fields of barbed wire that 

[57] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

defended the summit until we reached the statue 
that dominates a vast sweep of the Rhine Valley. 
The buttresses of the Ballon plunged steeply down 
into the valleys that I was to visit within the next 
few days. Thann, Massevaux, Mulhausen, Alt- 
kirch lay spread in the plain, and along the horizon 
we could feel, though we could not actually see it, 
the Rhine, then the goal of all our desires. 

We coasted down through the woods again and 
arrived at Belfort, France's great frontier fortress, 
toward four o'clock. The town had suffered sorely 
from air-raids, but its life was still going on. And, 
as I passed through it, I caught a glimpse of the 
great Lion, more than seventy feet long, that Bar- 
tholdi carved from the solid red sandstone cliff 
that holds Vauban's famous citadel upon its sum- 
mit — the Lion de Belfort who, raising himself on 
his haunches, growls toward Germany, commemorat- 
ing Denfert-Rochereau's heroic defense of the city 
during the terrible winter of 1870-187L 

Through the ancient Porte de Brisach we left 
the city and followed out the so-called "trouee de 
Belfort," the vulnerable gap between the Vosges 
and the Jura, the possession of which by an enemy 

[58] 



IN GERMAN ALSACE 

would lay France open to an invasion from the east. 
Finally we reached La Chapelle-sous-Rougemont. 

In this small town were established the head- 
quarters of the division — which I found to be the 
Thirty-Second — to which I was going. As we ar- 
rived, the inspiring notes of a band of the chasseurs 
alpins, those blue devils so intimately connected 
with the Vosges campaigns, greeted our ears, setting 
our pulses going with the fast rhythm of the marches 
and the brilliant flourishes of their trumpets. 

Division Headquarters occupied an ordinary 
Adrian barracks divided into offices by rough pine 
partitions. Into one of these offices my chief led 
me and introduced me to the division commander, 
Major-General Haan, the man who had trained the 
division in Waco, Texas, brought it to France, led 
it afterward into its first fights, and made it what it 
was, one of the crack divisions of the A. E. F., the 
only National Guard unit chosen later to form pa-rt 
of the Army of Occupation on the Rhine. 

He was more than kind to me during my stay 
with his men, and his aide-de-camp guided me to 
the most interesting points in the front line. To- 
gether we visited the observation-posts beyond 

[59] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

Soppe-le-Bas and peered through narrow slits 
in these steel boxes at Ammertzwiller and Bern- 
haupt-le-Bas, ruined villages in No Man's Land 
where the Germans had their O. P.'s. Again, we 
walked out along the abandoned Canal du Rhone 
to a lock in which one of our outposts were estab- 
lished and, on the way back, got a good shelling 
from the German batteries that were trying to locate 
our artillery positions. We visited these too and, 
for the first time, I heard the bark of the 240s — ^a 
roar, especially when the guns fired in salvos of four, 
that set my ears ringing. 

But these were the only bits of real warfare that 
I witnessed in that sector. Both ofiicers and men 
were straining at the leash, so to speak, eager to 
get out and fight and push their way to the Rhine, 
but held back, and for excellent reasons, by the 
High Command. 

I saw one or two sham battles, however. One 
afternoon General Haan asked me to go with 
him on a tour of inspection, accompanied by his 
officier de liaison, a remarkable major who looked 
like an Irishman in a French colonial uniform, and 
by his French aide-de-camp, who had received eighty- 

[60] 










=3 :i 



IN GERMAN ALSACE 

two wounds, the only visible sign of which was a 
black patch over one eye. 

As we drove along, I watched with interest the 
effect of the two stars on their red field that signalled 
the general's car. Everybody was "on his toes." 
The M. P.'s stiffened and gave their smartest salutes; 
the sentries rattled their guns in their snappiest 
manner. We stopped in a field near Giromagny 
to watch an infantry battalion advance under cover 
of the artillery over a supposed No Man's Land to 
take a village beyond. The platoons worked their 
way forward slowly, signalling to each other so as 
to keep in touch by means of rockets fired from pis- 
tols. Every little while they stopped, took what 
cover they could find, and then went on again. It 
all looked very quiet and far removed from the dash 
and clatter of the bayonet charge that the stay-at- 
home might expect, and yet, when I saw the real 
thing later, I realized that this was, generally speak- 
ing, what modern warfare actually looked like. 

Later, quite by myself, I spent a couple of days 
in exploring the north end of the sector in a side- 
car, my first experience with a "wife-killer." One 
day I sketched in and around Massevaux, or Mas- 

[61] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

munster as the Germans call it, the principal town 
of the valley of the Doller — a typical Alsatian burg 
with high-pitched roofs and half-timbered houses, 
seat of a famous abbey of nuns founded in the eighth 
century. Just before the French Revolution the 
abbey, which had become so important that 
Catherine of Russia was sent to it to be educated, 
was to be rebuilt and enlarged. An architect from 
Strasbourg was called in, Kleber by name, the same 
who afterward became so renowned as a general. 
The main building that he designed was destroyed 
by fire, but if it may be judged by the portions that 
remain, no great artistic loss was suffered, for Kleber 
would seem to have been a much better soldier than 
architect. 

Up the valley beyond Massevaux the reserve 
battalions of the 125th Infantry were billeted 
through little manufacturing villages, Kirchberg, 
Oberbruch, Dolleren, whose tiny cottages resembled 
the houses in Noah's Ark, our men towering enor- 
mous beside their diminutive doors and windows. 
On Sunday the people, misshapen, homely, trooped 
to church, dressed in strange clothes, and those 
queer bonnets that one sees in certain parts of south- 

[62] 



IN GERIVL\N ALSACE 

ern Germany, and their guttural patois, at that period 
of the war, sounded singularly obnoxious to the ear. 

As south Alsace is much more germanophile than 
the northern end of the province, I was constantly 
interested in watching the attitude of its inhabitants 
toward our soldiers. Indifferent they certainly 
were not, and I thought most of them distinctly 
surly and ill-tempered, which impression was con- 
firmed by many of our officers. As I bumped along 
the road beside my driver with his rifle strapped 
down the handle-bar, I caught, out of the tail of 
my eye, many a sour glance cast in our direction — 
the kind of glance that, in the old legends of the 
country, turned wine to vinegar. 

But, as I have said before, this little trip of mine 
into German Alsace was quite in the nature of an 
excursion, a glimpse of a charming country in May- 
time. 

But it was my last peaceful experience. The 
period of preparation of our combat divisions was 
almost ended. The hour of their active participa- 
tion in battle was at hand, sooner than any one could 
have expected. When next I saw the Thirty -Second, 
it was pushing its way up to Fismes. 

[63] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

By the time I returned to Neufchateau, the month 
of May had ahnost passed. On Thursday, the 30th, 
the Germans broke through between Soissons and 
Reims, and a few days later had fought their way 
into Chateau-Thierry, where they had been tem- 
porarily halted. Those were dark days — ^in many 
ways the darkest of the war. While hoping for the 
best, every one feared the worst. 



[64] 



Ill 

CHATEAU -THIERRY AND THE MARNE 



I 

BELLEAU WOOD 

CHATEAU-THIERRY had been taken and 
the Germans were on the Marne again only 
fifty miles from Paris. 
On the 1st of June I was ordered to that city 
on a special mission. The only other American in 
the compartment was a colonel, just back from the 
Philippines, who, having reported at G. H. Q., was 
now on his way to rejoin his old command, a regi- 
ment in the Third Division. At Bar-sur-Aube we 
found his troops on the move, the station littered 
with field equipment and crowded with men in 
khaki. 

At Troyes the depot was filled with refugees — 
the first tide of forlorn-looking derelicts bound they 
knew not whither. Here ensued a long delay, and 
after that we made very slow progress. At Romilly 
the tide of refugees increased, and as our train drew 

[67] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

in they broke their bounds and hterally stormed 
it, fining with their pitiful bundles every available 
corner. At Nogent the same sad picture — the plat- 
forms a confused and swaying mass of humanity laden 
with every conceivable object: bedding, bird-cages, 
clothing, boxes, bags, and household articles piled 
into baby -carriages. Strings of locomotives from 
the repair-shops and roundhouses of Chateau - 
Thierry were being towed into comparative safety. 
One felt the Germans very near, as indeed they were, 
this line being the next one menaced in any new 
advance. 

Now we began to meet troop-trains one after 
another until the tracks were fairly choked with 
them, hastening up reinforcements where they were 
sorely needed. We were due in Paris at 6 p. m., 
but at that hour were still creeping along many 
miles from the city. Long stops followed and it 
was 1 A. M. when we finally reached the suburbs. 
I was just congratulating myself that the long jour- 
ney was over when we were shunted off on to a sid- 
ing. 

Suddenly the heavens lit up, streaked with the 
tall shafts of search-lights. Innumerable new stars 

[68] 



BELLEAU WOOD 

and constellations blinked and twinkled in the 
firmament and the barking voices of the antiair- 
craft guns told us we were in for an air-raid. 

Nearer came the lights. New batteries awoke. 
Bright flashes streaked the sky and the din grew 
momentarily louder. Two women in our compart- 
ment almost went into hysterics, continually crying, 
as we tried to reassure them: ^'Que voulez-vous; nous 
sommes des femmes !"" And it was terrifying, out 
in the open night with only the roof of the car over- 
head for protection. The din reached its climax; 
the lights grew dimmer, the barrage more distant, 
and we thought that all was over. But a new cres- 
cendo arose. Again the flashes; again the roar of 
the guns and the bursting bombs, and again all died 
away. 

It was a long raid — four separate attacks, one 
after another; then, after nearly two hours' delay, 
quiet was restored, and at 3 a. m. we pulled into 
Paris and emerged from the Gare de I'Est into the 
Stygian darkness of unlighted streets. . . . 

When I returned to G. H. Q. a few days later, 
the first fights in Belleau Wood had already taken 
place but the wood was not yet entirely cleared. 

[69] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

So, with two comrades, I set off by motor in that 
direction. We had a long day's ride via Joinville, 
St. Dizler, and Vitry-Ie-FranQois. The road de- 
scended the valley of the Marne, following, for the 
most part, the river itself, which gathers size before 
your eyes. 

Beyond Vitry we entered the bare open reaches 
of La Champagne, marked here and there with the 
lonely graves of the brave fellows who fell while 
trying in vain to stem the first German advance. 
The road lay straight before us for miles, rolling 
up and down a monotonous succession of hills one 
after another. 

Though we were well behind the lines, at times 
the traffic was intense. Chains of camions, making 
an infernal clatter and din, thundered along at light- 
ning speed, enveloped in sickening clouds of dust. 
Under the deep hoods their drivers' faces appeared, 
covered with a whitish mask of limy powder, spread 
thickest on their eyebrows and beards and in the 
wrinkles of their foreheads, until they looked like 
some strange creatures of the Nibelungenlied or 
men in the legends of the Norsemen. 

We passed a big American camp near Sommesous, 

[70] 



BELLEAU WOOD 

and beyond that, strings of British aviation lorries 
and ambulances driven by dusty blond English- 
women. At Connantre we waited at the railroad- 
crossing while long trains of Italians went by on 
their way up toward Chalons or Reims. All the 
resources of the Allies were being rushed up to parry 
the next desperate blow. 

We reached Montmirail toward evening, and next 
morning set out for the headquarters of our Second 
Division, which we learned were in a chateau not 
far from Essises. This we found without much 
trouble, though every precaution had been taken 
to conceal the importance of the spot. 

An M. P. stopped us some distance away and 
ordered our car parked under the trees. We were 
then led through the woods and by the shaded walks 
of the vegetable-garden to a back door of the hand- 
some chateau, whose main gates remained closed 
as if the place was uninhabited. 

Inside, however, we found it teeming with ac- 
tivity. Orderlies and stenographers filled the bil- 
liard-room; the Intelligence and telephones occupied 
a large drawing-room. The Chief of Staff received 
us in a smaller salon in which the furniture had been 

[71] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

pushed back and replaced by a big work-table on 
horses, upon which were spread large-scale maps 
concealed by papers. 

After questioning us, he sent us up to Brigade 
Headquarters, where, in an abandoned farm, La 
Malmaison, beyond Viffort, we found General Sladen. 
We told the general of our desire to see and make 
drawings of Chateau-Thierry- — ^a desire at that time 
not easy to gratify. He showed us on the map where 
we might go and sent his aide-de-camp with us as 
far as regimental headquarters. Here we were sup- 
pHed with a runner who led us out through the fields 
and woods to a hill just above Nesles. The town, 
surrounded as it was with artillery positions, was 
being shelled and the detonations sounded uncom- 
fortably near. Then as we walked farther on, a 
sniper's bullet zinged between one of my companions 
and myself and snapped off a branch of a sapling 
just beside us. 

After that we proceeded very cautiously, finally 
stepping from the fringe of woods into an orchard. 

The ground fell away down to the Marne, and 
there, directly opposite, only a mile or so away, 
looking quite peaceful — unbelievably so, in fact — 

[72] 



BELLEAU WOOD 

lay Chateau-Thierry. Rumor had it that the town 
had been destroyed and burned. Yet every httle 
while, as the sun shone through rifts in the clouds, 
it lighted up different parts of the city — the ware- 
houses round the depot on the near side of the river, 
the conspicuous tower of the church of St. Crepin, 
the emplacement of the old chateau, and, from this 
distance, little damage appeared. On the hills be- 
yond the city the Germans lay concealed and every 
little while a shell would come singing toward us 
with that strange wabbly noise that we grew to 
know so well, and would burst behind us over toward 
Nesles; and every little while a black puff of smoke 
or a gray one, breaking beyond the city, would show 
the effectiveness of our reply. 

TVTien we had completed our sketches, we turned 
back, little realizing, in those dark days, that in a 
short space of time, we should be walking in 
Chateau-Thierry's ruined streets. 

Next day we set out for Belleau Wood. 

After some trouble we found the headquarters of 
General Harbord's brigade in a deserted farmhouse. 
La Loge, situated on the main road from Paris to 
Chateau-Thierry, a little beyond Montreuil-aux- 

[73] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

Lions. This was the same brigade that I had visited 
near Verdun and, up to that time, it had done all the 
fighting in the Bois de Belleau. From La Loge we w ent 
on to Maison Blanche, the headquarters of Colonel 
Neville's regiment, the Sixth Marines, in which 
we found the colonel conferring with his second in 
command and one or two other officers, but he left 
presently to make a tour of inspection in the wood. 

The lieutenant-colonel took us about and showed 
us the big fresh shell-holes in the orchard and a new 
hole gaping in the roof. We carefully concealed 
our car in the woods near by and he gave us a runner 
to guide us to Belleau Wood, saying, as we parted: 
" Go as far as you like, but be sure to keep fifty paces 
apart on the way out." 

Thus spaced in single file, we set out through 
shell-torn fields and bits of woodland where the 
branches hung limp, snapped off by bullets, and 
where the narrow paths were choked by fallen trees. 
Through an opening we could see Lucy-le-Bocage 
lying off to the left, ruined, desolate, deserted. From 
this point on, we followed a little ravine or gully 
that afforded us some protection (for the shells were 
coming over) and through which the men made 

[74] 



BELLEAU WOOD 

their way to and from the wood. Here and there 
a pile of fresh earth, marked with a bit of paper 
fastened to a stick and with a steel helmet placed 
upon it, showed where some poor fellow had paid 
the ultimate price. 

Then we reached a culvert that carried the road 
from Lucy to Bouresches across the ravine. Under 
the protection of its stone supports, we found a first- 
aid dressing-station established, and here we stopped 
a moment to rest. A few wounded lay about wait- 
ing to be sent back. Above my head a great tree 
had been lopped off by a shell and lay across the 
gully. The bottom of the ravine itself was littered 
with debris of every description, with parts of gas- 
masks, cans, canteens, broken stretchers, rifles, 
cartridge-belts, and fragments of bloody uniforms 
ripped from wounded men — sorry relics of suffering. 

There were too the articles from their pockets: 
tobacco-tins, gum, cards, and especially bits of torn 
letters from home. And as I sat in this scene of 
anguish, my eye caught these words written on a 
fragment of paper: "A son such as I have found 
you to be. God grant that you may be returned 
to that mother has and will be my constant prayer.'* 

[75] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

An ambulance appeared for a moment on the 
road above the culvert, loaded its human freight, 
and turned back again. Stalwart Marines with 
rifles and packs made their way cautiously through 
the ravine on their way up to the wood. In the 
heat of the June afternoon the smell of the clotted 
blood and the stings of the big gray horse-flies grew 
unbearable. 

We climbed out of the gully and stood for a moment 
on the open road, looking at the desolation over 
toward Bouresches, then dropped down into the 
ravine again, and continued our way until we reached 
the south end of the Bois de Belleau. 

Here, by good fortune, I found Major Sibley's 
battalion, the very one that I had visited near Hau- 
diomont. The major greeted us warmly and led 
us over to his dugout, situated among those of his 
men in the thick of the woods. 

Belleau Wood, now become so famous in Amer- 
ican annals of the war, is but a little stretch of wood- 
land, running north and south, scarcely more than 
a mile in length and half a mile wide. It is composed 
for the most part of small trees that grow in clusters 
from a single root and interlock their branches to 

[76] 



BELLEAU WOOD 

form thickets so dense that it is with difficulty that 
one pushes his way through them or sees more than a 
few yards ahead. Here and there taller trees — ^birches, 
beeches, and oaks — tower above this smaller growth, 
and in certain parts of the wood, especially toward 
its east front, the ground rises into steep eminences 
crowned with big gray boulders that form ideal 
shelters for machine-gun nests. 

In this tangled bit of woodland, a veritable 
fortress, the Germans had securely established them- 
selves in their forward thrust toward Paris, and it 
was from this stronghold that our gallant Marines 
had had to drive them. 

Seated near his dugout, with the shells whistling 
overhead and at times snapping off the branches 
near us, the major told us of the attack, describing 
how his men fought their way into the wood, wriggled 
on their bellies through the dense underbrush, and 
finally charged the machine-gun nests hidden in the 
rocks and clubbed the gunners over the heads with 
the butts of their rifles. Lieutenant Noble's com- 
pany, it seems, was in the thick of it, suffered 
severely, but behaved like heroes, and their com- 
mander was recommended for the D. S. C. 

[77] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

None of us, I am sure, at that time realized the 
importance of the engagement nor the place it would 
take in American history. We only thought of it 
as the first "real scrap" that our soldiers had been 
in, and knew that their behavior in it gave most 
brilliant promise for the future. 

There, about us in the wood, were the men who 
had done the work. And truly a strange picture 
they made, scattered among the trees, each buried 
to the shoulders in his sandy dugout, for all the world 
like prairie-dogs peering from their burrows. Some 
were busily cleaning their guns, or polishing up 
their accoutrements; while others were rearranging 
their kits and brushing their muddy uniforms. Peck- 
ing about among them I noticed a small speckled 
hen — Si strange sight, indeed, in such a place — and 
I asked about her. 

"Why, that's Lucy," the major said. And he 
told us that when his men took Lucy-le-Bocage this 
little chicken was the only living thing they found 
there. Though food was very scarce, Lucy's life 
was spared and she became the battalion mascot, 
pecking for crumbs with impunity though followed 
by hundreds of hungry eyes. 

[78] 







A Major > Diijiout in licllcaii Wood 



BELLEAU WOOD 

Toward evening the bombardment redoubled in 
intensity. The colonel returned from his tour of 
the wood, and we started back with him toward 
his headquarters. Hostile planes hovered overhead 
and several times we had to take cover in the edge 
of the woods. The shells too were falling uncom- 
fortably close. Wlien we reached Maison Blanche 
again we found that a big one had just burst in 
the court, wrecking an outhouse and killing a man. 
Our chauffeur told us that he was in our car when 
he heard the shell coming. He didn't know how it 
happened, but when it exploded he was under the 
car. Sand-bags were being piled in the farmhouse 
windows that were wide open when we left. 

When we finally departed ciuite late in the eve- 
ning, the colonel's last words to us were specific: 
"Beat it like hell !" And we did. 

We spent a few days more sketching in this Bel- 
leau sector, one of them with another battalion of 
the same regiment that had taken part in the fight 
but was now in reserve. Then, as there seemed 
little prospect of any immediate new activity, we 
returned to our station at Neufchateau. 

[79] 



II 

ALONG THE MARNE AND UP TO 
FISMES 

ABOUT a monili later, that is, on July 15, 
the Cennans delivered their last desperate 
blow. This time, however, it fell against 
a solid wall. At only one important point did that 
wall break. The French, sorely pressed, yielded 
along the Marne from Jaulgonne to Chatillon, and 
the Germans, crossing the river, threatened to pour 
up the Surmelin Valley and continue their march 
toward Montmirail and Paris. 

But a thorn stuck into their side. Four regiments 
of Americans belonging to the Tliird Division still 
stood firm along the river, stretching from Chateau- 
Thierry nearly to Jaulgonne, spoiling their plan and 
impeding their advance. 

Then, on the 18th, Marshal Foch delivered his 
smashing counter-stroke, and the German retreat 

[80] 



ALONG THE MARNE AND UP TO FISMES 




Sketck-rnap of tfie Chateau-Thierry reyloa 



began — a retreat that was not to stop until the war 
ended. Each day thereafter shortened the depth 
of the Chateau-Thierry pocket, until, by the 27th 

[81] 



THE AMERICAN FKOXT 

of July, its southernmost edge lay in front of Fere- 
en -Tardenois, wliere, along the heights that dominate 
the Ourcq, the Germans tried desperately to arrest 
the Allied advance at least long enough to permit 
their sliattered divisions to retreat. But here again 
their line was broken, and, by the 3d of August, 
the pocket was entirely wiped out, and the Amer- 
icans had reached Fismes on tlie road between Sois- 
sons and Reims. 

A few days after this Allied offensive began, I 
again set out for the Chateau-Thierry region, by 
the same road that I had before taken. 

This time, however, I headed from Montmirail 
directly toward the Marne, descending the Surmelin 
Valley that I have just mentioned. Its westerly 
side lay in the American area, and khaki was the 
prevailing color in the villages, but across the valley 
I could see French regiments moving up, the bright 
July sunlight glittering on their guns and bayonets 
and on the long muzzles of the loos. 

As we entered Crezancy, we found it crowded 
with Americans. It too was the first to^^^l that was 
smashed to bits. Shells had ploughed through its 
houses like knives through cheese. Disembowelled, 



ALONG THE MARNE AND UP TO FISMES 

their walls stood tottering. Their red tiles, shaken 
by terrific concussions, had slid from the roofs and 
lay in heaps, littering the streets, leaving only the 
bare beams and rafters, skeleton-like, against the 
sky. 

The church was hopelessly shattered and our men 
were eating their "slum" in its battered pews. 
Across the street a Red Cross Ambulance was estab- 
lished, and a large house that our men designated 
as '*The Chateau" was being used as the head- 
quarters of the Thirty-Eighth Infantry. 

Here we stopped for lunch, and it was lucky for 
us that we did so. 

I found myself placed next to the colonel, Ulysses 
McAlexander, a "regular," now promoted to a 
generalship. I began to ask him about the battles 
that had just taken place and he, in answer, began 
to tell me what his regiment had done on the two 
first crucial days of the German push. I was, I 
think, the first outsider he had talked to since those 
stirring days, and he became quite excited — as ex- 
cited indeed as I was, for it was a thrilling story to 
listen to thus at first hand. 

Briefly this is what he told me. Four American 

[83] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

regiments (as I have before stated) defended the 
Marne from Chateau-Thierry eastward to Crezancy : 
the Fourth, Seventh, Thirtieth, and his regiment, 
the Thirty-Eighth, which held the right of our Hue 
with the French adjoining. The main-Hne tracks 
of the railway from Paris to Metz and Strasbourg 
run along the south bank of the Marne, and he was 
advised to use their embankment as his principal 
line of defense. This he did, but he also decided 
to place men all along the river-bank itself in rifle- 
pits dug among the reeds, and never to let the Ger- 
mans even set foot on his side of the river. He 
inquired of the French adjoining about his right 
flank, and was assured that it was strongly defended 
and perfectly safe. But here again he determined 
to take no chances, so had trenches dug en echelon 
up the side of a hill that commanded a wide field 
of fire tmvard the French. 

"I don't know what they thought of me," he 
said, "but I never asked." 

When the Germans delivered their terrific blow, 
his men along the river stood firm in their rifle-pits 
and prevented a landing. AATien the French fell 
back upon his right, his trenches on the hill became 

[84] 



ALONG THE MARNE AND UP TO FTSMES 

of paramount importance and enabled him success- 
fully to defend his exposed flank, so that his regi- 
ment stuck like a wedge out into the enemy lines, 
to their eternal discomfiture. 

To illustrate his story better, he left the tabic 
and returned with some maps and photographs in 
his hand. Among the maps was one taken from a 
captured German officer showing the plan of their 
main attack. All the arrows that marked the line 
of their intended advance converged toward a bend 
of the river between Mezy and Jaulgonne with Cre- 
zancy as its centre, for Crezancy lies at the mouth 
of the Surmelin Valley, up which they were to ad- 
vance. 

And it was the wedge of the Thirty-Eighth In- 
fantry that stopped their advance. The air-photos 
clearly corroborated this, for they showed the Ger- 
man tracks down to the north bank of the river, 
and on the south bank where a Landwehr regiment 
succeeded in crossing opposite the Thirtieth, and 
where other units crossed in to the area occupied 
by the French. But no tracks could be seen on the 
south bank in fnmt of Crezancy. 

When we had finished lunch, the colonel asked: 

[85] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

"\Miat are you doing this afternoon?'* 
"Nothing," I rephed, "except my sketching." 
"Do you want to go over the field with me?" he 
inquired — and j'ou can guess my reply. 

So he called his orderly, picked up his stout cane 
with a Prussian officer's black-and-silver sabre-knot 
twisted round it, and we set off. First we proceeded 
to the eastward past Moulins and as far as a hill 
back of Varennes. Here he turned off the road and 
led us off' at a clipping pace through the wheat-fields 
toward the Moulin Ruine that had been his P. C. 

And there, on the lower slopes of this hill, he 
showed us the trenches he had dug. Khaki caps 
and coats and heaps of empty cartridges lay in them. 
Their field of fire toward the river was wide and 
open. Some of the dead had already been buried 
but many had not, and all sorts of things lay in the 
tall ripe wheat. The July sun was ardent and tliere 
was a sickening odor in the air. 

As we walked about, the colonel, with his cane, 
raised the fallen wheat enough to show the direction 
in which it lay, trampled one way as the Boches 
advanced and in the opposite direction as they fell 
back before his murderous fire. 

[80] 



ALONG THE MARNE AND UP TO FISMES 

Next he led us down across the railroad embank- 
ment to the Marne — ^here an open quiet-running 
river, perhaps thirty yards wide — and showed us the 
rifle-pits dug along its bank. Grenades lay about in 
quantities, mingled with American equipment, but 
nothing Boche. 

There were new graves here and there, and before 
one of these the colonel stopped and raised his hand 
to his cap in salute. 

"Do you know who lies here.'''* he asked. "No? 
Corporal O'Connor. Corporal O'Connor hid himself 
here in the reeds and waited until the first boat- 
load of Germans — men of the famous Sixth Grena- 
diers — ^had almost succeeded in getting across, and 
the man in the bow was just reaching with his grap- 
pling-hook to catch the shore. Then he rose from 
his hiding-place and gave them his grenades full 
in the face, sinking the boat and killing all its occu- 
pants. He also was killed where he stood." 

This spot upon the Marne where the Germans 
never crossed should be hallowed forever by every 
good American, for here, to my mind, was marked 
the turning-point of the war. 

Continuing our walk along the river, we reached 

[87] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

a point between Mezy and Charteves where the 
Germans did succeed in getting across in the area 
occupied by the Thirtieth Infantry. To our left, 
Mezy's beautiful old Norman church-tower still 
reared itself sadly against the sky, surrounded by 
the shattered remnants of its parishioners' homes. 
Across the river Charteves' church la}^ in ruins, only 
a fragment of its tower pointing like a thin finger 
toward heaven, calling for vengeance. 

The golden wheat-fields of the Ile-de-France and 
its rolling hill-slopes covered with gardens and 
orchards, made, by contrast, these scenes of desola- 
tion the more poignant. To the north the rumble 
of the cannonade sounded like the constant roll of 
drums. 

We left the river and turned back through fields 
strewn thick with Boche equipment. The ditches 
were filled with debris and with objects that stank 
of clotted blood. I picked up a helmet and found 
it full of matted dark hair. After that I didn't care 
to investigate nor look for souvenirs. All the Ger- 
mans that got across were either killed or taken 
prisoner. 

We had now completed our tour of Colonel Mc- 

[88] 



ALONG THE MAUNE AND UP TO FISMES 

of shattered villages along the river that lay within 
the range of our artillery: Jaulgonne, Mont St. 
Pere, Blesmes, Glands — razed to the ground, every 
one of them, their buildings so formless that, in the 
dazzling sunlight, they resembled only the reefs of 
some coral islands — a "joli pays,'* as one decrepit 
old peasant bitterly remarked to me. 

For, now that the tide of battle had been pushed 
back even a little, a few poor old people, having 
nowhere else to go, were already wandering back, 
returning to seek their ruined homes, searching 
among the debris for their scattered possessions, 
lamenting the disappearance of their household 
utensils, pointing shudderingly at mattresses soaked 
with blood. All was cliaos and confusion where 
only a few days before had been order and con- 
tent. 

Chateau-Tliierry itself was by no means hope- 
lessly ruined; had, in fact, only suffered in spots. 
Many of its streets were quite intact. Others were 
but a mass of debris. The Church of St. Crcpin 
was filled with plunder, collected by the Germans, 
read}^ to be taken but abandoned at the last minute 
in the hurry of their departure. 

[01] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

The handsome stone bridge across the Marne 
had been dynamited and the hea\y masonry of two 
of its arches lay blocking the channel, but already 
blue-coated engineers were swarming over it like 
ants restoring a trampled ant-hill. Long, serpent- 
like columns of kliaki-clad troops crawled over the 
two pontoons to the eastward and clattered along 
the stone-paved quays into the city on their way 
northward to reinforce the attack. 

I climbed to the site of the old chateau that 
Charles Martel, according to tradition, built in the 
eighth century for good King Thierry. What scenes 
its gray old walls had witnessed ! Taken by the 
English in the thirteenth century, retaken by Charles 
the Fifth a half century later, besieged and assaulted 
again and again, its ruins saw the fierce combats 
of 1814, when the irresistible soldiers of the Great 
Napoleon drove off the Prussians and Russians who 
left twelve hundred dead upon the ground and 
eighteen hundred prisoners in the hands of the vic- 
tors. But what imaginative soothsayer would have 
dared to prophesy that the next time a battle was 
waged beneath its venerable walls it would be the 
youth of far America that would again rout the 

[ 9-2 ] 



ALONG THE MARNE AND UP TO FISMES 

Hun and make the name of Chateau-Thierry forever 
glorious in the annals of American history ! 

There it lay beneath me, the silent city, utterly 
deserted save for the long columns of khaki-clad 
troops marching ceaselessly along the river. The 
belfry of St. Bothan and the sturdy tower of St. 
Crepin still rose intact above the broken roof-tops, 
while, near at hand, the lantern of the Hotel de Ville 
cut its battered silhouette against the sky. A great 
square of houses that bordered the main street, 
gutted by air-bombs, were now mere empty shells, 
scorched and blackened by fire. Beyond the river, 
the soft green slopes of the Marne hills, covered 
with woods and wheat-fields and orchards, seemed, 
by contrast, a mockery to the tragedy of the shat- 
tered city. 

Off toward the right rose the slopes of Hill 204, 
that redoubtable stronghold of the enemy, his citadel 
from which he commanded a view of all the Marne 
Valley. Later on, I spent an afternoon wandering 
through its defenses. Rifle-pits and shelters, dug- 
outs and P. C.'s, excavated deep into the sand under 
gigantic boulders, honeycombed the ground under 
its rounded brow, which was ravaged and torn by 

[93] 



THE a:\ieuican front 

sholl-liolos and oompletoly donudod of its woods, 
only a few blaokonod stiiinps slaiidini;' like the last 
few hairs on a bald head. 

The Boehes had just left and the pits were full 
of debris: beddini;- and mattresses stolen from the 
ruined \'illai;es near by, overcoats and field-gray 
uniforms, Mauser rifles, bayonets, heaps of "potato- 
mashers" (as our boys call the Boelie hand-grenades) 
mixed with cigarette boxes, bits of eatables, and the 
fcldpostbricfs so plentifully supplied to the German 
army — all the rubbish, in fact, of a hastily aban- 
doned camp. 

From the crest of the hill, where the Paris road 
turns to descend the other side, 1 could look down 
into the village of Vaux, now, alas, but a heap of 
ruins bordering the highway. 

When our gallant ^Lirines had finally cleared 
the enemy from Belleau Wood, they straightened 
out their line through Bouresches and, by the end 
of June, prepared to take Vaux. Xot a house in 
the town escaped the withering artillery -fire that 
preceded the attack. Every German shelter in the 
town was sought out and peppered, and when the 
infantry rushed it on July 1, they even went beyond 






A^ 



)m3 








.= -2 '^ 



ALONG THE MARNE AND UP TO FISMES 

and gained a foothold on the lower slopes of Hill 
204. 

I wanted to appreciate the pleasant sensation 
of even this small advance, so decided to make a 
detour, going round by Nogent I'Artaud, so as to 
reach the Paris road again at a point near Maison 
Blanche, where Colonel Neville had had his head- 
quarters when I first was in Belleau Wood. His 
house now stood empty and the roads and woods 
about it were deserted. We could motor on beyond 
without even hearing the whistle of a shell, and in- 
stead of crawling up through that narrow ravine, 
could take the open road straight into Lucy-le- 
Bocage and out over the top of the culvert where 
the dressing-station had been, to the fields beyond 
Belleau Wood. 

Here too all was quiet and deserted. But among 
the gray boulders where the machine-guns had been, 
I found fresh copies of the Boston Transcript and the 
Springfield Republican that told me where the New 
Englanders of the Twenty-Sixth had relieved the 
Marines of the Second. 

The Twenty-Sixth was put in line here early in 
July, and lay in its hastily dug trenches along the 

[95] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

east front of the wood, harassed night and day, until 
the great AlHed offensive opened on the 18th. 
Then, in haison with the French on its left, it went 
over the top. 

Torcy and Belleau were taken in the jBrst rush, 
and our men in their eagerness even charged up 
the slopes of Hill 193 beyond, but had to be recalled 
to await haison with the troops on their left. A 
day or two later they were at it again and this time 
puslied over the hills of the Marne, on to the plateau 
of the Orxois and to the slopes that descend to the 
Ourcq. 

They left their traces along their path of victory. 
The fields in front of Belleau Wood were dotted 
with lonely graves — sometimes one, sometimes 
three together, sometimes a group of six. A rude 
wooden cross marked each grave, with a musket 
stuck into the ground beside it and a flat khaki- 
colored helmet hung upon it. 

Of the little chain of villages, Bouresches had 
suffered most. Nothing but ruins surrounded its 
place, in whose centre rose a tree, an oak centuries 
old, whose vast wide-spreading leafy arms had long 
shaded the picturesque square. Now it stood a 

[96] 




p^ a~ 



ALONG THE MARNE AND UP TO FISMES 

gaunt skeleton, shot to pieces, its branches lopped 
off, amputated one by one, its trunk riddled and 
pitted and peppered by bullets and shrapnel. 

As I finished a drawing of it, it dawned upon me 
that it was noon and that I had only had a cup of 
coffee and a bit of bread for breakfast very early 
in the morning. There were a few French soldiers 
in the village and I hailed a sergeant and asked if 
he knew where I could get something to eat. He 
led me to a house where six officers were gathered 
round a table. It was the best room they could 
find. Its four walls were standing but a shell had 
torn a big hole in the ceiling, a hole that had been 
covered with a tarpaulin to keep the rain out. No 
glass in the windows, of course, and a door that could 
not close. The table was the ordinary "dining-room 
table" of the petite bourgeoisie, lengthened with its 
leaves, and covered with a red-and-white checked 
oilcloth. 

The dishes were gathered from the wreckage of a 
dozen china-closets, but carefully and symmetrically 
ranged along the table, to which two vases of field 
flowers added an almost festive note. The food 
was passed by an ordonnancey sl hirsute old terri- 

[97] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

torial of fierce appearance but very gentle manner 
who performed his service quietly and well. 

And as I shared this lengthy luncheon and lis- 
tened to the unceasing conversation, I could not 
help thinking of the many x\merican messes that I 
had attended, where everything was put upon the 
t<able at once and the men despatched their hearty 
meal in a few minutes. 

Even the French soldiers made a little function 
of their meals and tried to rest their weary bodies 
and tired nerves at table, finding, in the humblest 
villages, some outhouse or ruin where they coidd 
sit down in quiet to eat their "soupe.'' Our boys — 
God bless them — lined up before the field-kitchens, 
with their mess-kits in one hand and their canteen 
cup in the other, received meat and vegetables — 
their "slum" — in the mess-tin and a half pint of 
black coffee in the cup; then went off like healthy 
young animals into a corner to devour their food 
in silence, growling if any one came near to disturb 
them ! . . . 

Before we went up with the troops again, we 
decided to have a good night's rest, get off our 

[98] 




C -^ '■: 



y c 



ALONG THE MARNE AND UP TO FISMES 

clothes, and wash up a bit in La Ferte-sous-Jouarre, 
where we knew of a decent hotel, the nearest one 
to the present front. We reached it late in the after- 
noon and succeeded in getting a room — the last 
one vacant in the house — up under the mansard. 
Soon after dinner, we retired and were half undressed 
when I heard some one in the street saying: "There's 
a light up there." Going to the window I saw two 
people looking up and making signs. Then the dull 
drone of an aeroplane — the special drone of a Boche 
motor — reached my ears and the distant explosion 
of a bomb brought us to our senses. We blew out 
the candle and stood by the window. 

Nearer and nearer came the buzzing motors, so 
near indeed that, even in the darkness, we felt we 
could see big black objects moving against the stars, 
and bang, bang, bang went the bombs as they began 
to land in the town about us. Should we retreat 
ignominiously to the cellar? All the house was 
dark and still and we didn't know where the cellar 
was. 

Again and again the great black bombing planes 
circled over the city. Again and again the bombs 
fell and their explosions rent the air, mingled with 

[99] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

the sound of broken glass and the crash of crumbling 
walls. Then the droning grew more distant, then 
ceased entirely, and a feeling of deep thankfulness 
came with the silence of the night. Next morning 
we learned that they had hit nineteen of our men, 
and that in certain streets near Corps Headquarters 
not a pane of glass remained. Such was our restful 
night in La Ferte ! 

We lingered along the road on our way up to the 
front next day. For, after we had crossed the Marne, 
we saw our first big piles of German ammunition 
cased in wicker-work; we saw their cantonments for 
man and beast, their abris and kommandanturs that 
had been occupied but a day or two before, and 
their signs marked every road. 

So it was already getting late when we reached 
the crossroads at Courmont, and overtook our vic- 
torious army on its way up north. Here were the 
guns, the artillerymen bestriding their horses like 
centaurs, draped in their slickers and casqued with 
the flat helmet of the soldiers of Cyrus — giving a 
wonderful impression of youthful calm and manly 
vigor. Here were the "doughboys" plodding dog- 
gedly along after their days of hardship and their 

[100] 



ALONG THE MARNE AND UP TO FISMES 

sleepless nights, column after column of them with 
their packs upon their backs and splashed to the 
hips with mud, but happy because they were moving 
and the Boche was "on the run." 

Just as darkness settled down, we groped our 
way into Cierges, where we found a Division Head- 
quarters established in a more or less ruined villa 
just outside the village. It proved to be the Thirty- 
Second, the division that I had visited down in Ger- 
man Alsace some months before, and in the busy 
offices I found several of my old acquaintances. 

"A billet? Sure; come along." 

And they led us over to the battered village and 
to the remnant of a house in which several of them 
slept. There they gave us an empty room, window- 
less, doorless, with a shattered ceiling that, every 
time a big truck went rumbling by, shook down 
upon our heads. We placed a door or two on the 
stone floor to sleep upon and were fixed for the next 
few days. 

Then we listened to stories of what the Thirty- 
Second had been doing. 

It had, it seemed, relieved the Third Division 
that had fought its way north from the Marne 

[101] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

through Charteves and Jaulgonne as far as Cour- 
mont. On the 30th of July the Thirty-Second was 
in the Grimpette Woods overlooking Cierges. After 
two days of the bitterest fighting, it drove a wedge 
through the main German positions to the north 
of the town and by midnight of the 2d of August 
had attained Dravegny, five miles farther to the 
north. On the following day, it made another big 
push and by four o'clock its patrols looked down 
into Fismes, the Allies' main objective on the Vesle. 

This certainly was remarkable work for a new 
division. The men were all proud of it and well 
they might be, for advances of from seven to eight 
kilometres a day were rare accomplishments in those 
days. 

Next morning General Haan took me out on a 
hill behind headquarters to show me the terrain 
about Cierges. To the southward, he pointed out 
the Grimpette Woods where his infantry lay con- 
cealed before the attack. Cierges lies in a pronounced 
hollow — a mere village dominated by a fine old 
church-tower. His troops had charged from the 
woods at dawn across the open fields, and had suc- 
ceeded in taking the town only to be gassed out of 

[ 102 ] 




Tlic Church, Cierges 

( Merges was taken by troops of the Thirty-Second Division in the battles along the Ourcq. 
A Red Cross flag was hanging from this steeple with ,i machine- 
gun placed in the windows beside it 



ALONG THE MARNE AND UP TO FISMES 

it again, for the gas was unbearable down in that 
pocket. 

So, seeking whatever cover they could find, they 
prepared for the more serious work of capturing 
the hill that lay to the north of the town — Hill 230. 
On top of this eminence, the general pointed out a 
farm called Bellevue and a long line of trees that, 
he told me, screened some quarries that had been 
made into veritable fortresses studded thick with 
machine-gun nests. 

Two or three footpaths led up this hill, bordered 
with brambles and shrubbery. Up these paths our 
men had crawled before dawn, when, at the sound 
of the whistle, they rose and charged up and over 
the hill. Hand-to-hand fights in the quarries; fierce 
combats round the farm. The machine-guns had 
to be taken one by one, but finally the last of these 
hornets' nests was silenced and our men moved on 
over the crest of the hill and dug in before Reddy 
Farm, another important stronghold overlooking 
a vast expanse of country to the northward as far 
as the valley of the Vesle. 

Later in the day, I walked up to Bellevue and 
the quarries. The farm was shot to pieces; the 

[103] 



THE a:\ierican front 

quarries filled with kits and knapsacks, with coats 
and rifles and strings of empty cartridges. The 
dead still lay unburied in the fierce August sunlight. 

Reddy Farm was taken early in the morning of 
August 1. It had been an important German head- 
quarters, the residence of Prince Eitel Frederick. 
Allien I saw it, its walls were peppered with shrapnel 
and breached with shell-holes, and it had been con- 
verted into a field-hospital. But upon the door of 
the operating-room I still could discern, written in 
chalk: "Abt. 1. Kasino, General Stab." 

The view northward from Reddy Farm is, as I 
have said, almost without limit. Hill after hill 
stretches off toward the valley of the Vesle, open, 
bare, dotted only here and there with patches of 
woods in the hollows. 

As I went farther north, I found, on one of these 
open slopes, not far from the village of Chamery, 
the grave of Quentin Roosevelt. He was buried 
by the Germans where he fell, in a lonely spot marked 
from afar by a single tall poplar, a conspicuous 
landmark. Parts of his aeroplane lay upon his grave 
and a few flowers gathered from the fields had also 
been placed upon it by our soldiers. 

[104] 



iiiisTuii.rjiW s 










7 -^ '^- 



ALONG THE MARNE AND UP TO FISMES 

The German retreat had been so rapid from here 
on that the villages had suffered but little. Cohan 
and Dravegny were quite intact. From an old 
monastery perched on a hilltop farther north we 
watched the artillery at work. On the hills near 
us, the shells were bursting, the puffs of smoke seem- 
ing to issue from the ground rather than strike into 
it. Our guns, hidden in woods in the hollows, re- 
plied, but never a wreath of smoke revealed their 
presence. Once in a while, for the fraction of a 
second, the eye could detect a tongue of flame among 
the leafage. And in the distance, we could plainly 
see our shells dropping into "Bocheland" across 
the River Vesle. 

The Americans had reached the Vesle on August 
5, after two days of desperate fighting for the town 
of Fismes, with whose capture the Thirty-Second 
had fittingly crowned its sensational and spectacular 
advance. No wonder that General Haan was proud 
of his division ! *' At the time of the battles on the 
Marne," he said to me with his usual quiet modesty, 
"I told General Pershing that, while my division 
was not, perhaps, all that I might wish it to be, I 
felt sure that, if he would give it a chance, it would 

[105] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

give a good account of itself and could take its place 
in line for combat work." The Commander-in-Chief 
took him at his word and events certainly proved 
that he was right. 

Some of my readers will, perhaps, think that I 
have dwelt unduly upon the deeds of the Thirty- 
Second. If they happen to be men of the Rainbows, 
they certainly will, for the Forty-Second also cov- 
ered itself with glory in those epic fights along the 
Ourcq. 

The Orxois (or country of the Ourcq) is a great 
plateau, cut by numerous deep little valleys, drained 
by tiny water-courses, locally called rus, swift-flow- 
ing rivulets that, in rainy weather, quickly swell the 
more placid Ourcq. A few patches of woods, some- 
times quite extensive, alternate with great open 
fields that afford no shelter whatever to attacking 
troops. 

It was across such fields that our infantry had 
to advance to storm the heights of the Ourcq. And 
it was the Forty-Second that had the hardest part 
of the work to do, it having just relieved the Twenty- 
Sixth, that, depleted by the severe fighting at Torcy, 
in Trugny Wood, and through the Forest of Fere, 
was in need of rest and reorganization. 

[106] 



ALONG THE MARNE AND UP TO FISMES 

So on the Rainbows now devolved the task of 
taking the Ourcq Valley just east of Fere-en-Tar- 
denois as well as the heights that lie to the north — 
a terrible task indeed, for every farm in the vicinity 
was a machine-gun nest and every village a redoubt- 
able stronghold, a veritable fortress, to be won only 
after the bitterest of hand-to-hand conflicts. Sergy 
changed hands four times before our troops were 
finally able to hold it. Scringes was taken, held 
for forty-eight hours, then lost one night, only to 
be retaken again next morning. 

The story of these fights along the Ourcq will 
be told by better pens than mine — by the pens of 
the men who fought them and who saw them. But 
the towns themselves when I beheld them a few 
days later, still graphically bore witness to the 
severity of the fighting. Their streets had not as 
yet been cleared of debris nor had the shell-holes 
been filled up. Their houses were gutted; their 
churches disembowelled by high explosives. A 
sickening stench of rotting horse-flesh, of unburied 
dead, was in the air, augmented by the heat of early 
August. Flies that bred by the million infested 
the air and stung like poisoned needles; the clouds 
of dust strangled you on the roads. Those were 

[ 107] 



THE .OIZRICAX FRONT 

the days when our hospitals were taxed to their 
utmost capaoty; whoi our doctors and nurses had 
no rest by day or night, 

Fere-en-Tardenois bore the same imprint of deso- 
lation as the vassal villages about it. A certain 
number of its inhabitants, it is true, had remained 
hidden in their cellars during the bambardment, 
and were now busily engaged in clearing out their 
rained homes where such a thing was possible. Ger- 
msji prisoners, clceely guarded, were put to work 
to aid them, and I watched with a certain amount 
of pleasure one squad of them as they cleaned up 
the wrecked Mairie that still bore upon its front, 
in letters three feet high, the words: Orts-Komman- 
dantur. 

By the beginning of August the Allied line had 
definitely reached the Vesle, and the Chateau- 
Thierry pocket was wiped from the map. 

Our divisions, mingled with the French, settled 
down again to a war of attrition, encouraged, some- 
what exhausted, and glad to breathe again after 
their first big serious offensive effort. So. there 
being Httle prospect of any further action on this 
front, we returned to Xeufchateau. 

; lOS] 















•-•i*^:^^ 






.^'; 

^i^;'^ 

.*;'^>^.: 



!'"-i'lf^ 



(^ ;v-^^ 



9^ 







^-A- 















•i = 

CO o 

r ^ 

1/ "C 



-0^ c 

f^ '7 



^ = 






IV 
THE TOUL SECTOR 



THE TOUL SECTOR 

WHEN writing about our period of prep- 
aration, there was one sector occupied 
by the Americans that I did not de- 
scribe, the one called the Toul sector. 

I omitted it purposely, for it seemed to link itself 
naturally in my mind, in the light of what happened 
afterward, with the taking of the St. Mihiel salient. 

We used to go to it frequently from Neufchateau, 
for it was the most accessible as well as the most 
active of the sectors held by our troops in the early 
months of 1918. 

Two roads led to it: one straight and direct by 
way of Colombey-les-Belles, the other via Domremy 
and Vaucouleurs. The latter road is the prettier 
and is, besides, of greater historic interest. For 
Domremy, birthplace of Jeanne d'Arc, lies upon it, 
only six miles north of Neufchateau, hidden away 
in a secluded valley, a sleepy little Lorraine village 
that strings its humble dwellings and manure piles 
along the highway. 

[HI] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

The house in which Joan was born stands a Httle 
back from the main road, from which it is fenced 
off by an iron grill. It is shaded by pines and fir- 
trees and still makes quite a romantic picture with 
its windows en craix and its Gothic niche above the 
door. You are shown the room in which the maid 
slept and the window by her bed through which 
she heard the voices. Adjoining the house is the 
humble parish church in which she was baptized 
and afterward repeated her fervent prayers, while, 
on the hill above, on the site of the Bois Chenu, 
rises a great modern basilica that offends the eye 
as well as destroys the simphcity of the place. 

Situated as it was upon a highway, in an active 
sector, Domremy was constantly being visited by 
soldiers, both French and American; and I have 
seen (and I confess that a lump arose in my throat 
as I saw it) French regiments march by it at salute — 
the officers raising their swords to their chins, then 
sweeping them outward at arm's length; the men 
turning their eyes fixedly upon the sacred spot. 

Beyond Joan's natal village, the road follows her 
footsteps as she trudged to Vaucouleurs to see the 
Sire de Baudricourt, her first friend, the man who 

[112] 



THE TOUL SECTOR 

gained her her audience with the King. Enough 
remains of his town and castle on the hill to show 
that it must have been a typical stronghold of the 
Middle Ages when the maid first entered it by the 
Porte de France, still standing. 

Vaucouleurs being, in the spring of 1918, in a 
rest area, its streets were always full of soldiers, 
usually Senegalese or marsouins or men of the famous 
Foreign Legion wearing the red fourragere.* 

Only a few miles farther north, every village was 
alive with American soldiers, reserve battalions 
ready to support in case of an attack and to relieve 
the tired regiments as they came out of the trenches 
of the Toul sector. 

Toul itself lies farther to the east — a considerable 
city, of great antiquity, surrounded by massive 
walls designed by Vauban, above which rise the 
beautiful twin towers of the cathedral. Its suburbs 
are, you might say, one vast barracks, for it and 



* The origin of the fourragere is, I think, not generally known. A French 
regiment, sent into action, ran away. The next time it went into combat, a 
halter was hung round each man's neck with nails attached so that, if he fled, 
he could be hanged at once. As a result the men were transformed into heroes 
and the rope — the fourragere — became a badge of distinction. It is now con- 
ferred in three colors: those of the croix de guerre, the medaille militaire, and 
the Legion of Honor. 

[113] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

Verdun were the guardians of eastern France, her 
chief reliance, her bulwarks against Germany, against 
the first tide of attack, the base of the triangle whose 
apex was Metz, Germany's greatest fortress. 

All the way from Toul to Verdun stretch the 
Cotes or Hants de Meuse, a regular succession of 
truncated hills resembling the mesas of our south- 
west, their gentle slopes rising to flat, platform-like 
tops that form admirable positions for defense. 

From Toul westward, these hills, each crowned 
with a fort, were held by the French, their last strong- 
hold being Liouville, that guards the valley opening 
toward Commercy. From this valley north, how- 
ever, unfortunately for us, the Germans, in their 
first onslaught, had stormed and taken the Cotes 
half-way up to Verdun, from the formidable Camp 
des Romains in front of St. Mihiel to the tragic 
valley of Les Eparges. 

So that on all the western and southern front of 
the salient, the Germans held the heights that com- 
mand both the valley of the Meuse and the low- 
lands of the Woevre. 

The Woevre is the name given to the great plain 
that extends northward from Toul as far as the 

[114] 



THE TOUL SECTOR 




Sketch-map of the St. Mihiel salient 



mining districts of Briey and Longwy. Its soil is 
thick and heavy, holding the water In wet weather 
so as to form a slippery, sticky mud as well as 

[115] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

numerous lakes and ponds. It was in these wet 
lowlands that our trenches lay, dominated in all 
their extent by w^atchful eyes on top of Mont Sec, 
an isolated mesa, the Germans' main stronghold in 
the sector, an observation-post that gave them an 
uninterrupted view up and down our lines. 

From the marshy plains of the Woevre, the Cotes 
rise gently, cultivated on their lower slopes, with 
well-kept vineyards that produce the esteemed vins 
gris de Lorraine, the wines of Thiaucourt, in par- 
ticular holding an honorable place among the grands 
cms of France. 

It was on such a hill covered with just such vine- 
yards, about midway between Toul and St. Mihiel, 
that our Division Headquarters were established 
in a village called Boucq. I shall never forget my 
first impression of it. On the way out from Toul, 
I had been watching the "sausages" that hung in- 
tent over the opposing lines and the bursts of shrapnel 
that broke in the air, and had been listening to the 
booming of the big guns up toward Verdun. Then, 
as we turned up the hill toward Boucq, it seemed 
strange, indeed, to see the peasants working in their 
vineyards, cutting, pruning, digging, as if they were 

[116] 



THE TOUL SECTOR 

a hundred miles or more from any scene of combat. 

Headquarters were in an old chateau, built in 
the fifteenth century, but partially remodelled at 
some much later period. Windows of larger dimen- 
sions had been opened into its massive curtain-walls 
and a few outhouses had been added, but, with its 
battlements and corner turrets, its low Gothic door- 
way defended by machicoulis above, and its high- 
pitched roofs, the Chateau de Boucq still preserved 
all the essential characteristics of a feudal castle. 

We found Major-General Edwards, the com- 
mander of the Twenty-Sixth Division that for so 
long held this sector, in the main salon of the ground 
floor — a very handsome Louis XV apartment, done 
in white-and-gold, that opened directly on the gar- 
den. I have the distinct impression that the general 
disliked being found in such luxurious surroundings, 
for he constantly insisted on referring to more active 
portions of the sector: Dead Man's Curve, Beau- 
mont, Seicheprey, as well as to the fact that, even 
in the chateau, they were directly exposed to ar- 
tillery-fire. When next I saw him he had no need 
to make excuses for the peacefulness of his surround- 
ings. 

[117] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

I confess however that the terrace of the chateau 
is an idylHc spot. Shaded by parallel rows of clipped 
trees centuries old, its balustrades overlook a vast 
stretch of the Woevre, a view that, on a fine day, 
seems almost without limit, stretching from Sanzey 
and Menil-la-Tour on the right, over the Foret de 
la Reine to the grassy wastes of No Man's Land 
and the hated heights of Mont Sec on the left. Were 
it not for the Adrian barracks under the trees to 
house the staff and the great camouflage nettings 
over them to screen them from the air, you would 
scarcely realize, at most times, that a war was going 
on. 

Not until you looked into those wastes of No 
Man's Land did you realize, peering through your 
glasses, that the villages apparently intact when 
gilded by the setting sun, were in reality mere heaps 
of crumbling walls, empty shells, skeletons bleach- 
ing in a desert. 

Our trenches practically followed a portion of 
the main road that stretches from Commercy to 
Pont-a-Mousson. The names of the villages along 
this road — Rambucourt, Xivray, Beaumont, Flirey, 
and especially Seicheprey, where the Americans 

[118] 



THE TOUL SECTOR 

repelled their first attack and received their first 
baptism of gas — will always recall vivid memories 
to the men, and they are legion, who have occupied 
this sector. 

I visited in turn each of these towns and under 
very varying circumstances: first, in the early days 
when one had practically to crawl about to escape 
observation; then later, when they were filled with 
the victorious tide of our First Army as it advanced 
to take the salient, and, lastly, when they were a 
billeting area far behind our lines, housing the units 
that were mending the roads or en repos. Beau- 
mont's commanding situation, Seicheprey's desolate 
surroundings in the wastes of No Man's Land, 
Flirey's wonderful church-tower, poised miraculously 
in mid-air with one side entirely shot away — these 
will remain pictures treasured in the minds of all 
the men who took part in the historic combats here- 
about. 

Behind the trenches, we sought out the artillery 
positions, the "75s" quite near at hand, the 
"heavies" much farther back in the Foret de la 
Reine and along from Minorville to Martincourt. 
Two proud captains took us one day — Louis Rae- 

[119] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

mackers, Heath Robinson, Captain Townsend, and 
me — to sketch their "big babies," their "240s," ghs- 
tening monsters hidden from the prying eyes of 
aeroplanes in red-earth pits, carefully banked up 
with sand-bags and covered with broad screens of 
camouflage netting that broke all shadows and de- 
stroyed all contoiu-s. 

It was principally in this Toul sector also that 
we sketched the Hfe behind the lines: the big Q. M. 
dumps at Sanzey and Menil-la-Tour, the auto-chir. 
hospital near Aulnois, the railheads and engineer 
dumps near Pagny; the aviation-field near Toul, 
where we used to visit the trophy-room and see its 
many souvenirs and drink champagne presented to 
the young officers by the grateful citizens of the city 
in recognition of their protection. 

And the billets of the sector ! The billets in 
Boucq, in the crowded towns behind Jouy-sous-les- 
Cotes, in Corneville and Vertuzey, where men from 
the prim towns of New England bunked in barns 
with pigs and chickens and in hay-lofts with cooties 
and rats; the billets in the old Abbey of Rangeval, 
where some of the soldiers slept in rooms with beau- 
tiful Louis XV panelling and others in whitewashed 

[120] 




- M 



THE TOUL SECTOR 

cells. But whether in whitewashed corridor or 
panelled hall; in a peasant's barn or a bourgeois* 
comfortable bedroom, the cheerful optimism of 
healthy young America always held the upper hand 
and manifested itself in a thousand jokes and 
"scraps"; in baseball and in hikes into all the sur- 
rounding countrysides. These sane pleasures, added 
to constant drills and periods spent in the trenches, 
kept the men occupied and fairly happy. 

Such was life in the Toul sector until the month 
of September came. 

Then, suddenly, a feverish activity developed. 
Something certainly was in the air, a great military 
secret, but every one was talking about it. New 
divisions kept arriving until eight had been gathered 
in the salient — two hundred thousand men. The 
American army, now an autonomous whole, was 
to strike its first great blow under its own com- 
manders, under its own Commander-in-Chief, Gen- 
eral Pershing. The day that every one had been 
waiting for had come. 



[121] 



V 
TAKING THE ST. MIHIEL SALIENT 



I 
ABOVE LES EPARGES 

ON the evening of September 10 I dined 
at the Lafayette Club in Neufchateau 
with a friend, Frank Sibley, correspondent 
of one of the leading Boston papers and specially 
accredited to the Twenty-Sixth, or "Yankee," Divi- 
sion that I have just been writing of in the Toul 
sector. He had just returned from Paris and was 
anxious to get back to his New Englanders, who were 
then stationed up near Verdun. We knew, as I 
have said, that the stage was set, ready for a big 
drama, but, having no exact information as to when 
or where it was to take place. Captain Morgan and 
I decided to take our friend up to his division and 
see what we could learn. 

We set out by the same road that we had taken 
when we went to visit the Marines at Haudiomont. 
But this time, upon reaching Souilly, we turned off 
toward Recourt, for we heard that Division Head- 

[125] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

quarters had been moved over to a village called 
Rupt-en-Woevre. This information proved correct. 
When we asked for headquarters, we were told that 
they were "around the corner in the chateau." But 
this time the " chateau," though the most important 
house in the squalid village, was nothing more than 
a vulgar dwelling made of red-and-white glazed 
bricks, quite different from the ancient Chateau de 
Boucq down in the Toul sector. A hallway divided 
it in half, with a room opening at each side. To 
the left was the busy office of the Chief of Staff; to 
the right, that of the commanding general, simple 
and bare, again a sharp contrast to the elegant Louis 
XV salon at Boucq. 

General Edwards, keen and alert as usual, minus 
his Sam Browne belt and wearing his two-starred 
overseas cap poised jauntily on one side of his head, 
greeted us cordially. "I suppose you'd like to see 
what we're going to do," he said. "Come over and 
have a look at the map." And, jumping up, he led 
us to a table upon which was placed a large relief- 
map of the region, the hills and valleys carefully 
modelled in scale with all their contours painted in 
nature's colors. 

[126] 



ABOVE LES EPARGES 

Drawing our attention to the rough country about 
Les Eparges, with its deep-cut vales and steep hills, 
he said: "It's a bad country to operate in and we've 
got a tough job to push down through it, but we'll 
do it." And then, looking out at the rain that was 
falling in torrents, he asked: "Is it raining down in 
Toul?" And, "That's bad," in answer to our af- 
firmative. 

And we knew just what he meant. For in the 
marshy lowlands of the Toul sector the roads get 
soft and spongy. And down there was the other 
tooth of the nippers that were to bite into the salient 
and cut out, as with a surgeon's knife, what the 
French had always called the "hernia of St. Mihiel," 
a constant menace to their line, severing the main 
railway between Paris and Nancy. In February, 
1915, they had themselves attempted to cut out 
this salient, but the terrible tragedies of Les Eparges 
and Combres had taught them that the price was 
too great, and they had desisted, never to try again. 

"I don't suppose you can give us any idea when 
this operation is to take place, general," I ventured. 

"No," he replied. "All I can say is, 'you are 
warm.' And I can add, for your information, that 

[127] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

the best place to be Is up in the Grande Tranchee, 
near O. P. No. 2. To-night, however, you'd better 
sleep a mile or two back in Genicourt, and get up 
when the big guns wake you," he added, apparently 
as an afterthought, and with such an audible chuckle 
that we thought he was joking. 

Before we went back to Genicourt, however, we 
decided to take a look at the Grande Tranchee and 
try to find the observation -post that the general 
had mentioned, so that, if anything did happen, 
we should know exactly where to go. 

Up the valley all was apparently quiet. A few 
troops were moving over toward Mouilly, and along 
the edges of the woods, on looking more carefully, 
we could make out dense crowds of soldiers hidden 
under the trees, taking a breath of the evening air. 
We noticed also that a number of big guns, some 
howitzers on railway -trucks, others long-nosed naval 
guns, had just been moved up and were standing 
in the open fields unprotected by camouflage. 

The incessant rains had put a coating of oily mud 
upon the road. Through the Forest of Amblonville 
it was of the consistency and color of potato soup, 
for the soil on top of the Cotes is calcareous. And 

[ 128] 



ABOVE LES EPARGES 

I remember a pair of horses that lay in the road 
still hitched to a wagon that had been smashed to 
bits by a shell. The poor beasts, in their death- 
struggle, had rolled over and over, and lay white 
as clay statues, livid, coated with this sticky mud, 
through which great pools of blood welled forth. 

We hid our car in the woods and walked on to 
two company posts of the 103d Infantry. There 
we talked to the officers but could get no further 
information. But from what they did tell us and 
the look of things in general down toward St. Remy, 
we made up our minds that this was the place to 
be if anything happened. 

I slept that night in a ruined house in Genicourt, 
with my head pillowed on my haversack while the 
rats gnawed at the straps on its under side. In the 
small hours of the morning the big guns did wake 
us (for General Edwards had not been joking), and 
by dawn we were on our way to the P. C. where 
we had been the evening before. 

The howitzers and naval guns that had been silent 
were now splitting the air with the clamor of their 
voices and fairly shaking the earth with their con- 
cussions. Farther on, as we entered the woods, the 

[ 129] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

"155s," hidden under the trees, were firing in salvoes 
of four, while up in the Grande Tranchee the crack, 
crack, crack of the "75s" was uninterrupted, bark- 
ing and yelping like hounds on the chase. Our big 
barrage was going over. 

But very little was coming back. So, as the road 
was absolutely deserted, we kept straight on until 
we struck traffic: ambulances and ammunition- 
trains going up. We hid our car again and soon 
had reached the P. C, passed it, and were out in 
the trenches. Here we were told that the infantry 
had already gone over the top and were now in the 
German first-line trenches. 

Out in the blasted wastes of No Man's Land, 
however, where hill succeeded hill, once covered 
with dense forests, now but shell-torn barrens spotted 
with a few blackened stumps, nothing was visible 
but the shell-bursts that kicked up clouds of dirt 
or broke in dense balls of smoke. The "doughboys," 
as had always been the case up to this time, were 
practically invisible, hidden in shell-holes, in trenches, 
or under any cover that they could find. For all 
that we could see "a Corot would have been a 
better battle-painter than a Horace Vernet," as 

[ 130] 



ABOVE LES EPARGES 

*'Sem*' so graphically puts it in his "Pekin sur le 
Front." 

But soon the wounded began to filter in through 
the trenches — poor fellows, some walking quite 
erect with head or hand bound up; others stooping, 
doubled up with pain and fear, their khaki coats 
spotted with great brownish stains, their faces and 
hands bloody. Then came the litter-bearers, stag- 
gering through the slippery mud up the hill, steady- 
ing themselves by a hand pressed against the trench 
walls as they bore their heavy burdens — still forms 
stretched flat, immobile, covered with an O. D. 
blanket from which protruded a pair of spiked shoes 
with the toes turned up. When we returned to the 
regimental P. C. these pathetic figures increased 
in number, for near it a first-aid dressing-station 
had just been established. The stretchers lay upon 
the ground with the doctors stooping over them. 
The ambulances came up one by one, were filled 
as fast as the wounds were dressed, and despatched 
to the rear. 

To our left was a division of French Colonials, 
Senegalese as black as ink. Their wounded were 
also coming in, and one of the most striking pictures 

[131] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

I saw that day was one of these negro giants borne 
hke a bronze knight on the shoulders of four 
prisoners — a group reminiscent of the statues on 
some mediseval tomb. 

By now the prisoners were arriving in squads; 
then they were brought in by droves. In the first 
lot I counted no less than a hundred and forty; in 
the second over a hundred, and still they steadily 
poured in. Most of them were serious-looking men 
of middle age, who certainly seemed glad to be 
through with it, flinging down their helmets with 
gestures that plainly said: "Thank God, that's 
over." A few were slightly wounded, but the great 
proportion wore new uniforms, clean, unspotted 
with mud, showing cleariy that they had given up 
without a struggle; in fact, had dressed to go into 
captivity. Their sergeants lined them up in double 
ranks, under the watchful eye of their own lieuten- 
ants, while our men looked on with frank curiosity. 
Then they were questioned by our Intelligence offi- 
cers and marched off to the rear, shambling off with 
stooped shoulders under the guard of a few alert 
and rosy -cheeked young New Englanders. 

All day long they continued to pour in, and that 

[ 132] 



ABOVE LES EPARGES 

evening, at Rarecourt, the accommodations pro- 
vided were so inadequate to the numbers that had 
come in, that I saw hundreds of them huddled to- 
gether, crowded into temporary pens, fenced round 
with barbed wire, passing the night in the drizzhng 
rain — hving evidences of our victory. 



[133] 



n 
INTO ST. MIHIEL 

NEXT morning early, we started out for 
St. Mihiel to see what had happened down 
In that direction. 
It was the 13th of September, a date forever 
memorable in American history, and little did we 
suspect that, by our decision, we were going to as- 
sist at the very scene that makes this date historic. 
As we approached the city, we found that the 
only route by which we could reach it was the one 
that comes in from the west through Rupt-devant- 
St. Mihiel, an abandoned road in a desert landscape: 
tall dead grass where once had been rich fields ; acres 
of barbed wire where yellow wheat had sprouted — 
a country that had been a No Man's Land for four 
long years. As we approached Chauvoncourt, a 
suburb of St. Mihiel that lies across the Meuse, 
we found our way blocked. And when we got out 
we soon saw the reason. A mine had been sprung 

[134] 



INTO ST. MIHIEL 

the night before and an enormous hole some twenty 
feet deep gaped from house to house across the 
street. 

What a strange street it was! For four years 
Chauvoncourt had been lying in No Man's Land 
with only a German outpost or two among its bat- 
tered houses. Vines, many of them already blood- 
red in their autumn tints, had climbed at will over 
its stone walls, choked up its shuttered windows, 
closed its doors, and had even woven their tendrils 
round its chimney-pots. Grass and weeds formed 
an unbroken carpet over the rough paving-stones 
of this once busy thoroughfare. All was silent as 
death, and in this uncanny stillness a strange feeling 
came over one, as of walking in the streets of some 
plague-stricken city, of some town in a fairy-tale, 
cursed and enchanted by the wave of a Merlin's 
wand. 

We emerged from this street upon the banks of 
the Meuse, river of many memories. There we 
found a little group of children with French flags 
in their hands and bits of tricolored ribbon tied in 
their hair or clothing. French engineers had just 
succeeded in piecing together a rickety wooden foot- 

[135] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

bridge, made of doors, window-sashes, and pieces 
of panelling, leaning for support against the ruined 
stone bridge adjoining it. Across this unsteady foot- 
way these children had come, accompanied by a 
few women and an old man or two. 

They looked curiously at us as we came along. 
They had never seen our uniforms before. Finally 
some one exclaimed, "Mais, ce sont des Ainericains,^* 
and they all crowded eagerly about us, anxious to 
see the first representatives of that far-off nation 
that had come to their aid and made their deliver- 
ance possible. 

Fortunately I could talk to them and answer their 
many questions. I remarked that their children 
looked well. "Yes, they were good to the children. 
The soldiers were not so bad, many of them fathers 
themselves — but the officers ! If ever you get hold 
of a Prussian officer ..." followed by a savage 
gesture of hatred and murder. But their stories 
were not of the kind you read about In books — no 
lurid "atrocities," no "iron heels," but plain tales 
of cruel anguish, both mental and physical — the 
anguish of four long years of waiting with the French 
lines in plain sight all the time, yet never a word 

[136] 



INTO ST. MIHIEL 

from those they held most dear — sons, sweethearts, 
husbands in the ranks of the armies of France — the 
anguish of long privations, of insufficient food and 
heat, and the dearth of warm, clean clothes. 

"Four years, monsieur; think of it!" said one 
elderly dame. "I remember the day they came — a 
Thursday, the 24th of September, 1914. I was one 
of the first to see them coming and I cried out, * Mon 
Dieu, here they are, the Prussians,' and I almost 
went crazy. Three regiments came in. I can see 
them yet. They were proud in those days — ^proud 
and arrogant. Ah, if I had known that it was going 
to last four years, I should have died on the spot !" 

And one of the men told me that what irritated 
the Germans most was to be told that every nation 
in the world, both black and white, was against 
them. For a long time they laughed at the idea 
that America could help, saying: *'We won't let 
them come. Our submarines will sink them all." 
But during the late summer they avoided this sub- 
ject entirely. 

Then, suddenly, this same man looked up the 
river and exclaimed: "Why, the Devil's Table is 
gone!" And he pointed to some curious rock 

[137] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

formations, pinnacles and towers worn by erosion, 
that rose from the river-bank. On one of these, he 
said, a large flat rock had always hung poised, a 
great stone universally known as the Devil's Table. 
During the last bombardment it must have been 
knocked off, but its absence had not been noticed 
from the other side of the river. 

"Yes," I said, "the devil has gone and taken 
his table with him !" 

And, in fact, the devil had gone that very night. 
At sundown on the evening before the townspeople 
had been ordered to shut themselves in their houses 
and not to look out again till dawn. They heard 
sharp orders in the darkness and troops moving 
in the streets at midnight, and when they looked out 
in the morning not a Boche was to be seen. 

Followed by the curious children, we crossed by 
the rickety foot-bridge and entered the Place des 
Halles, a large square at the entrance to the city. 
Here a peloton of cavalry — ^French Colonials — and 
a single platoon of infantry were drawn up in a corner 
surrounded by quite a Httle crowd of people. These 
latter were dressed in their best clothes, most of 
them in well-brushed black, and with an unwonted 

[138] 



INTO ST. MIHIEL 

light shining in their thin, pale faces. All were talk- 
ing animatedly either to the soldiers or to each 
other — all except two young women with powdered 
cheeks and painted lips, who stood quite apart, 
and who, perhaps, were not so glad to see the Ger- 
mans go. 

Here again, In the square, our uniforms attracted 
much attention. And, as I talked to the poor people, 
I heard the same sad tales of pain and suffering, of 
Frenchmen, prisoners, who, from their windows, 
could see their own troops In their trenches, yet had 
to wait four years to be delivered. 

"Ah, monsieur," said one of them, "at the be- 
ginning of the war, I had three sons in the French 
army, and never a word of them have I heard since. 
I dread to have tidings of them now." 

All their provisions had been confiscated and 
their cellars rifled at the very beginning. Since 
then, they told me, they had not tasted a drop of 
wine or beer and had lived on black bread and a 
little tinned meat. Pulling out her loose clothes 
from her shrunken body, one of the women said: 
"Look at me; my own daughter won't know me." 

The town Itself looked quite intact. But each 

[ 139] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

house had been systematically pillaged, robbed of 
everything movable. German signs marked the 
various Kommandanturs and military offices, and 
over the door of one cafe I noticed the words *'0f- 
fiziers Kasino." Two women were just unlocking 
its door, and we joined them, curious to see what 
this Officers' Club would look like. It was but a 
common cafe. The mugs still stood upon the tables 
with the dregs of last night's beer in them; the re- 
mains of potato salad were in the bowls, and big 
muddy footprints on the red-velvet banquettes 
showed where some one had stepped up to tear the 
notices from the walls. I noted the prices on the 
Wein-Karte: eight to twenty marks for Moselle 
wine; vermouth, curagao, or "cognac," two marks a 
glass. 

Near the Hotel de Ville we met, to our surprise, 
an American aviator wandering about looking for 
a telephone, which of course he could not find, as 
none existed. He had been having a royal time, he 
told us, machine-gunning the retreating Germans 
up north, at close range, but had finally been forced 
down by engine trouble. His head-dress and coat 
attracted much attention from the children and 

[140] 



INTO ST. MIHIEL 

we went back to the Place des Halles escorted by 
quite a crowd, greeted also by gentle smiles from 
sad faces that peered from behind the window-cur- 
tains. French flags, resurrected from heaven knows 
what hiding-places, now hung out in the streets, and 
the town was more animated than when we first 
entered it. 

We had crossed the river and were on our way 
back to our car when, in the silent street of Chau- 
voncourt, we met and saluted a French general with 
his two stars soldered to the front of his trench hel- 
met. We had just admired his fine soldierly bearing, 
when on turning the next corner we stopped as- 
tonished. 

What was this brilliant group coming toward 
us? — brilliant indeed for the time and place. It 
took but a moment for us to guess, for walking at 
its head were two figures that all of us knew: Gen- 
eral Petain, Commander-in-Chief of the armies of 
France, and our own great Commander-in-Chief, 
General Pershing — the Frenchman robust, alert, his 
field uniform harmonizing well with his iron-gray 
hair and deep-blue eyes; the American tall, erect, 
free in his carriage, *' every inch a soldier," and re- 

[141] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

spending to our salute — a little surprised perhaps 
to see us there — with a most gracious "Good morn- 
ing, gentlemen." 

Behind these two great leaders followed a group 
of generals, mostly French, as well as a few staff 
officers, perhaps a score in all. How could we re- 
sist ? We turned and followed them, for we wanted 
to witness this truly historic event, the entrance 
of General Pershing into St. Mihiel. A few weak 
cheers, but rather an abashed and tearful silence, 
greeted the generals on the near side of the Meuse; 
then they picked their way across the rickety bridge 
in single file and cHmbed up into the Place des 
Halles. 

The bronzed cavalrymen were now drawn up at 
salute flanked by the platoon of infantry. And 
that was all the guard of honor that there was. The 
townspeople formed a compact little black crowd 
in the centre of the square, and as the generals ap- 
proached there were cries of "Vive la France ! Vive 
I'Amerique ! Vive Petain!'* But no one knew 
Pershing's name, and how should they, with all 
means of information cut off, immured as they had 
been behind the German lines. 

[ 142] 



INTO ST. MIHIEL 

Petain, however, effaced himself as much as pos- 
sible, leaving to the American Commander-in-Chief 
the homage due him as leader of the troops that 
had won the victory and delivered the town. So 
that when an elderly dame advanced, bent and 
rheumatic, with a bouquet of field-flowers in her 
hand, it was our general who took it, with all the 
gracious dignity and courtliness for which he is re- 
markable, his square shoulders relaxing, his head 
bending just enough to allow him to say a few words 
of sympathy and thanks. 

Ah, how touching it all was in its simplicity — 
this little ceremony before a mere handful of people 
— how different from such a scene as one might 
imagine it; how far removed from the entrance of 
victors into a beleaguered city as depicted in the 
history of the past ! 

The little party walked on toward the Hotel de 
Ville, where there were to be speeches by the mayor 
and others. But who cares for fine phrases on an 
occasion such as this? So thinking, we retraced 
our steps again back toward our motor. Just as 
we reached it a khaki-colored limousine came up 
and out of it stepped our Secretary of War, Newton 

[ 143] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

Baker, his plain civilian clothes, despite his tricolor 
headquarters brassard, looking strangely out of 
place in No Man's Land. With a brisk step, he 
set out at once toward the city, accompanied only 
by an American major. 

Well, we thought that all was finished, but one 
more surprise awaited us. For, as our driver was 
picking his way through the rough spots of the road, 
a new string of motors came rocking toward us and 
in the first one I recognized France's Premier, her 
grand old "Tiger," Clemenceau, eager also to be- 
hold the first French city to be liberated from the 
German yoke after four years of captivity. 



[144] 



Ill 

TO THE HINDENBURG LINE 

WE now headed off for the south front of 
the sahent, where the main bulk of the 
American army was engaged, taking 
the Commercy road as far as Sampigny, another 
one of those strange places that had lain so long 
between the lines, its houses absolutely deserted, 
with their shutters drawn like closed eyes and woven 
over with webs of vines and creepers. 

Here we turned off on the road to Apremont, 
crossing a particularly dreary stretch of No Man's 
Land, a cursed zone where nothing but weeds had 
grown in four years and whose villages, apparently 
uninjured at a distance, faded like ghostly phantoms 
as one approached, resolving themselves into a few 
broken doorways and crumbling walls. Near St. 
Aignant we reached the old French trenches. The 
engineers were just filling them in and had progressed 
far enough to allow us to go bumping over, so that, 

[ 145 ] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

as we laughingly said, we actually went "over the 
top in a Dodge." 

St. Aignant had been the ultimate French outpost. 
Apremont, just beyond it, had been German and 
both towns were perfect networks of defenses : street 
barricades with wattled revetments and gabions, 
machine-gun nests, labyrinthine abris and dugouts — 
all the elaborate system of long-organized resistance. 
Apremont, because German, was the more novel 
and, therefore, the more interesting. The entrance 
to each street from No Man's Land had been mined 
and blown up, so that great holes, fifteen or more 
feet deep, filled with rain-water, acted as moats 
against tanks and surprise attacks. The walls of 
all the surrounding houses had been reinforced with 
masonry or cement and were pierced with holes for 
machine-guns, so that they were veritable fortresses. 
Behind one fagade I discovered a scaffolding, four 
stories in height, like those made for masons, so that 
on each platform men could stand with their rifles 
pointed through loopholes, hke the meurtricres of 
mediaeval battlements, and command a field of fire 
down all the streets. These streets were, besides, 
a wilderness of wire, an inextricable tangle, inter- 

[146] 



TO THE HINDENBURG LINE 

spersed with chevaux de frise and loose coils whose 
barbs caught the foot and tripped one at every step. 

The road as far as Apremont had been quite free 
from traffic. But at Bouconville we began to strike 
the full tide of our advancing army — a tide that 
for days flowed on, never-ceasing, slow-moving but 
endless, sometimes congested and dammed for a while, 
then pushing on again; eating, resting, sleeping, 
joking, swearing, grumbling as it went, but cease- 
lessly and stubbornly advancing, oozing up every 
road it could find, as it followed the *'doughboys" 
that blazed the trail, pushing the Hun back to his 
main defenses on the Hindenburg line. 

We took the first opportunity that presented 
itself to pay our respects to Mont Sec, that hated 
hill, whose batteries had dominated our sector for 
so many months, whose telescopic eyes had watched 
our every movement. I hope its troglodytic habi- 
tations will be preserved for future visitors to see — 
its Kommandanturs with the Prussian eagle moulded 
in the cement above their entrances; its dugouts, 
plastered and papered, with furniture fashioned of 
twisted boughs, artistic abortions, but made with 
the patience and care dear to the German heart; 

[147] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

and its rustic pavilions on the sheltered side of the 
hill that recalled to my mind many a Turnverein 
picnic-ground in America. 

The crossroad at Flirey was always a busy spot 
in those days of the St. Mihiel offensive. When I 
first saw it, the tottering walls of the houses that 
once surrounded it were still standing, but in a 
day or two they were gone, pulled down, reduced 
to broken stone and loaded on trucks by the en- 
gineers to repair the roads of No Man's Land. 

Oh, those roads of No Man's Land; shall I ever 
forget them ! 

From Flirey to Essey was one; from Limey to 
Euvezin was another. Down one long swale of 
tangled weeds and wire, over a bit of soft bottom- 
land, and up the opposite hill. The wheels sinking 
to the axles; the road, if road it could be called, 
marked by dead horses, their stiffening legs in the 
air — poor worn-out beasts that had reached the end 
of their trail, the final effort of the long, weary haul. 
Artillery and wagon trains and, later, hues of trucks 
crawled painfully across these dreary wastes, 
strangely diminished in size by the immensity of 
their surroundings, through valleys that had re- 

[148] 



TO THE HINDENBURG LINE 

verted to deserts and fields unmarked by any fur- 
row, their noble trees but a few blackened stumps, 
their villages but piles of stones. . . . 

Beyond these empty spaces we found the German 
lines; then the villages that had been their head- 
quarters. Essey was one of these and an important 
one. In a protected angle of its church, where apse 
and transept meet, they had built a P. C, sheltered 
by the thick stone walls that stood between it and 
our artillery. And there, in plastered rooms with 
whitewashed walls and comfortable furniture, the 
German generals could work and sleep in peace and 
safety. Just outside this abri a rustic pavilion had 
been erected where, at a round table, the commander 
and his staff could eat their meals in the open air. 
Essey, when I first saw it, had just become one of 
the Brigade Headquarters of the Forty-Second Divi- 
sion, and its streets were filled with spluttering side- 
cars and motorcycles, and rattled with the ceaseless 
streams of wagons and, later, of heavily laden trucks, 
that rolled over its rough stones with a noise like 
thunder. 

We pushed on beyond it to Pannes — a village 
that our tanks had just taken and which was still 

[ 149 1 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

the headquarters of the tank corps, whose young 
officers were full of tales of combat — stories of how 
their steel beasts had devoured the machine-gun 
nests in the houses and cleared the town completely 
of the enemy. From the top of the hill to the north 
of the village I could see the shells still falling out 
in the fields toward Beney, and over toward St. 
Benoit, that our troops had just taken, clouds of 
smoke from fires and shell-bursts rose lazily into 
the air. 

From Pannes I proceeded as far as Bouillonville, 
a little place situated in a circular depression just 
behind our lines. Most of the German dead along 
the way had not yet been buried and in a quarry 
on a hilltop I came upon a machine-gun nest that 
had been put out of action by a single shell. Its 
four gunners had been caught eating when the shell 
came over and lay in a heap just where they had 
been sitting with their black bread and sausage still 
clasped in their stiff hands. 

Bouillonville and the woods behind it back to 
Euvezin were crowded with the reserve battalions 
of the Eighty-Ninth, a division that was making a 
name for itself in this drive. Its trucks were re- 

[150] 




»)??« 










y. 



TO THE HINDENBURG LINE 

turning from Thlaucourt, three kilometres ahead, 
filled with refugees, the civil population of the town 
being evacuated in view of the bombardment that 
was sure to follow its capture. I talked to a number 
of these poor people: nuns with placid faces; elderly 
men whose shrunken bodies only half filled their 
Sunday clothes of before the war; women in bonnets 
with strings tied under their chins, tired-looking 
and hungry after nights spent in cellars or in tending 
their peaked children — all of them leaving homes 
that they knew would now be destroyed, but happy, 
they said, happy in the thought that at last they 
were freed from the hated German yoke, freed 
by these sturdy, clean young boys from far-away 
America. 

One of the men thus told his story: 

"At one o'clock in the morning, on the night of 
September 12th, the bombardment began. At the 
sound of the first shell we all went down into our 
cellars. What was going to happen ? Several times 
already we had hoped to be delivered. Several 
times attacks had taken place but had not produced 
the desired result. All night we waited, not daring 
to hope. Then, between eleven o'clock and noon 

[151] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

on the 13th, the Boches departed, leaving only a few 
companies to cover their retreat, and these were 
later taken prisoners. 

"The bombardment ceased at about one-thirty. 
I took a peep out of the cellar and saw the Ameri- 
cans arriving. In a few minutes everybody was 
in the street to acclaim our Allies. We kissed them, 
we shook their hands, for it was impossible for us 
to express to them in words our joy and gratitude. 
Happily, we knew their uniforms, for we had seen 
a few prisoners pass — otherwise, we might have 
mistaken them for a new kind of German or * other 
Bulgarian ' ! This morning we packed up a few of 
our belongings, and here we are on our way to safety. 
Our poor city — what will become of it.^" 

Later on in that same day, September 13, I 
learned that the American First Army, acting as an 
autonomous unit, had attained all its main ob- 
jectives. 

The Twenty-Sixth, that we had seen start out 
the morning before near Les Eparges, had pushed its 
wav steadilv down from the north, and had reached 
St. Benoit, while the bulk of the army, wheeHng 
on Pont-a-Mousson as a pivot, with the veteran 

[152] 



TO THE HINDENBURG LINE 

First Division on its extreme left, had advanced 
from the south. These two main columns had been 
scheduled to meet in Vigneulles-les-Hattonchatel, 
a town perched high on the Cotes de Meuse in the 
very centre of the salient. It was a race as to which 
would reach it first. The Twenty-Sixth won, for 
its patrols entered the town at dawn on the 13th, 
exactly on time, and when the advance-guard of 
the First arrived a few hours later, the nippers closed 
and the St. Mihiel salient was wiped from the war- 
map forever. 



[153] 



VI 

THE GREAT MEUSE-ARGONNE OFFENSIVE 



I 
BEFORE MONTFAUCON 

DURING the week that followed the taking 
of the St. Mihiel salient there was much 
discussion among the officers as to where 
the next blow of the American army would fall. A 
large proportion of the men talked of a direct at- 
tack on Metz and most of their eyes were turned 
in that direction. 

But on the evening of September 24 we received 
a direct "tip" from General Headquarters to the 
effect that, if we went up somewhere northwest of 
Verdun, we "would be likely to see something in- 
teresting." That was quite enough. 

Soon after lunch we set out, three of us, for Bar- 
le-Duc, where we had a conference with our chief 
from G. H. Q., who had moved up there that day 
and who suggested that we go on as far as Clermont- 
en-Argonne, a town situated about ten kilometres 
behind the front line. We arrived there toward 

[157] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

seven in the evening but found only a regimental 
headquarters. The colonel, however, was very 
helpful. He explained that even from the hill be- 
hind Clermont, a conspicuous landmark and a noted 
O. P., that was bombarded every night, little could 
be seen of any actual engagement. But he advised 
us to find one of his captains, Norcross by name, 
over near Dombasle — a man who knew every foot 
of the country and could direct us just where to go. 
So we set out to find him. 

Twilight of late September was now deepening 
into dusk, and this dusk soon became a total dark- 
ness, utterly opaque, black as ink, unlit, in the early 
night, by any moon or star, for a foggy curtain hung 
low over the land. So, not daring to show the sign 
of a light, we had to creep along very slowly. Some- 
times a great camion would go crashing by and some- 
times a string of them. At the crossroads silent 
M. P.'s stood to direct traffic and prevent collisions. 
We finally reached Dombasle and took the first 
turn to the right as directed, following a deserted 
road up a long hill, but could discover no trace of 
Captain Norcross. 

Not a being was in sight and a brooding mystery 

[158] 



BEFORE MONTFAUCON 



SEDAN 




GRAKDPR 



'oMaUnecutL^ — — sA-Vi Ameritm 'ft»nt 



Sketch-map of the Argonne ofcnsive 

[159] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

had settled down upon these bkick wildernesses of 
bleak landscape — an uncanny feeling enhanced by 
the fact that we now knew perfectly well that with- 
in a very few hours hell would be let loose and every- 
thing would be on the move. 

Down a hill and we found ourselves in Brabant; 
then, most unexpectedly, back on the very same 
road from Clermont to Dombasle that we had just 
been following, for, in the darkness, we had made 
a complete circle. Near Recicourt we spotted the 
headquarters of the Thirty-Seventh Di\'ision in 
some dugouts by the roadside. Opening, then shut- 
ting a door, and raising a blanket that hung so as 
to obhterate any stray beam of Hght that might 
escape, an orderly led us into the adjutant's office. 
Here a few officers sat poring over maps or talking 
quietly in corners where the dim candle-hght threw 
huge grotesque shadows upon the wall. 

With the information we gathered there we set 
out to make one more attempt to find our captain, 
and a httle later did locate him in a hollow below 
Brocourt. He ad\'ised us to go on to Montze^'ille, 
saying that the big guns round where he was would 
deafen us when they woke up, while up at Montze- 

[160] 



BEFORE MONTFAUCON 

ville we would be beyond the heavy artillery as well 
as nearer the scene of action. 

So in the Stygian darkness we set out once more. 
It was now ten-thirty. We must again have taken 
a wrong turning, for suddenly we found ourselves 
in Sivry-la-Perche. But an M. P. set us right and 
we started off toward Bethelaincourt. The cannon 
were now beginning to wake the echoes and star- 
shells and rockets appeared toward the north. By 
this time we were very close to the front lines and 
we knew that at any moment anything might 
happen. One more wrong turning and we might 
land in "Bocheland"! 

No further mishap befell us, however, and when 
we reached Montzeville we sought out a shelter 
in which to pass the remainder of the night. All 
that we could find was the duck-walk leading into 
an abri where the doctors were getting what rest 
they could before the strenuous work of the morrow. 

At twelve-fifteen the artillery "preparation" be- 
gan. Flashes like those of some prodigious elec- 
tric storm swept the horizon. The booming of the 
distant guns, becoming less and less intermittent, 
rolled at last into one continuous roar. Just before 

[161] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

three o'clock the air was split by violent concus- 
sions. A battery of 15os in the very next room, 
so to speak, suddenly woke to action; some naval 
guns "around the corner" rocked the ground with 
the force of an earthquake. 

The great barrage had begun. 

The nearer crashes were answered by more dis- 
tant rumblings up and down the line until the roll 
of the guns came fast as a drum-beat and each beat 
was the voice of a cannon ! In sudden lurid flashes 
the ruined houses of Montzeville leaped out of the 
night, lit as if by lightning strokes, then, as instantly, 
faded into darkness. Bursts of pale-green balls 
arose, signalling to the artillery. Few shells were 
"coming over." Once in a while a dull thud and 
some one would call out "Gas !" But, for the most 
part, the Boche was in his dugout, hiding from our 
withering fire. 

As the first wan streaks of dawn began to pale 
the sky Montzeville appeared razed to the ground, 
and I found myself in a muddy roadway that once 
had been a village street — now nothing but ruts 
and puddles and shell-holes edged with a few bat- 
tered walls. The ambulances began to move, and 

[ 162 ] 



BEFORE MONTFAUCON 

toward five o'clock up went the balloons, slow, 
clumsy, like huge bloated worms, climbing skyward 
with their observers in their baskets, ready to watch 
the effect of our barrage. 

Terrific as it had been, the roar of the guns 
redoubled. Five-twenty-five was the zero hour. 
Never, we are told, in the history of the world, was 
such a barrage put over as on that morning of 
September 26. In the short American sector alone, 
four thousand guns were speaking, and the men were 
officially notified that this was no mere local offensive 
but "one grand push from the North Sea to the 
Vosges." 

And I thought of the effort and of the sacrifice 
that it represented; of the women depriving them- 
selves at home to make it possible; of the sweating 
men who had forged the steel ; the miners, the steve- 
dores, the stokers at hot furnaces braving the XT- 
boats; the engineers and all the men scattered across 
France that had pushed these men and guns to the 
front. . . . 

As dawn broke, we moved on up to Esnes, di- 
rectly under the southern slope of Hill 304, that 
hill of tragic memories. Its denuded flanks, scenes 

[163] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

of such bloody combats, rose bleak and barren, be- 
reft of all vegetation, behind the ruined town that 
lay in the valley wrapped in a bluish haze. To the 
eye alone all seemed peaceful enough. No clouds 
of battle-smoke rose high in air or hung low in the 
hollows; no cavalry went dashing by mounted on 
neighing steeds; no flags, no bands of music. 
Nothing to see but mud and dirt and troops, troops 
everywhere, plodding ever forward, struggling 
wearily on. 

But to the ear the war was a terrible reality, a 
terrific fact, for the noise was so deafening that it 
seemed as if one's ear-drums would burst. Short, 
fat howitzers, long 120s, thin-nosed as greyhounds, 
220s, all mouth, vomiting their big shells high into 
the air, hidden in the ruined houses of the village 
or banked in tiers up the hillslopes, belched and 
barked and thundered. 

Keyed up with all this din and excitement, I 
climbed among these guns toward the top of the 
hill. Cannons above me fired and recoiled; others 
below shot their hissing shells up over my head; 
red tongues of flame, like those of a blast furnace, 
leaped for an instant from the muzzles followed 
by wisps of bluish smoke. 

[164] 



BEFORE MONTFAUCON 

When I reached the summit of the hill, all beyond 
lay wrapped in an impenetrable mist. The men 
had stepped out of the trenches but were momentarily 
expecting a counter-barrage. Then we were all 
ordered off the crest of the hill and I returned to 
Esnes, where the wounded and prisoners were al- 
ready beginning to filter in. The first Boche to 
arrive was a scared-looking youth of nineteen, who 
was quickly hustled off in a side-car to be questioned. 
Then they began to arrive in groups, but not in any 
such numbers as at the beginning of the St. Mihiel 
attack — a sure proof that this was no *' walk-over,'* 
and that the resistance was stiff. 

Later in the morning I again climbed Hill 304, 
and this time was able to go on over its crest 
until I could look out toward the hills and valleys 
that lie beyond. It was a wonderful spectacle that 
lay spread before me, and, fascinated, I spent the 
remainder of the day wandering about, sketching 
and watching it. 

The bare hilltop on which I stood commanded 
an almost unbroken view over a vast stretch of coun- 
try quite devoid of any cover, absolutely denuded 
of trees or any growing thing, but pitted with shell- 
holes and fragments of wrecked trenches, the ground 

[165] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

falling abruptly away down into a valley where lay 
the ruined village of Malancourt. To the right 
spread the bleak expanse of Le Mort - Homme, 
ravaged and desolate — a place whose memories 
are as tragic as its name. To the left, however, 
some large patches of woods remained where the 
Bois de Malancourt joined the Bois de Montfaucon 
that lay beyond; while in the centre of this vast 
panorama, perched on its lofty hill about four miles 
away, rose Montfaucon itself, the proud eagle's 
nest from which the Kaiser watched the battles 
about Verdun. 

When I first arrived upon the scene, the Germans 
were still in the Bois de Malancourt, and Malan- 
court itself was just being "mopped up." A French 
battery of 75s was taking up position in a field 
near by, and I joined its officers, who had a powerful 
pair of glasses mounted on a tripod, so that, when 
the battery opened fire, we could watch its shells 
burst in the woods, where the rat-tat-tat of the enemy 
machine-guns was uninterrupted. 

Then, as the day wore on and the Bois de Malan- 
court was cleaned up, I could see, with beating heart, 
our troops emerge from these woods and start across 

[166] 



BEFORE MONTFAUCON 

the open to attack the Bois de Montfaucon beyond. 
Little khaki-colored toys they looked like, scattered 
out in open formation, just as I had seen them months 
before down in Alsace, training for a day like this, 
disappearing under the cover of any depression or 
shrubbery that they could find, then reappearing 
at the sound of a whistle, half-rising or crawling 
on ahead. 

And then a thrill went up my spine as I saw the 
tanks come out, strange lumbering creatures, crawl- 
ing one after another, Indian file, rocking like ships 
in a heavy sea, but steadily creeping forward on 
their caterpillar feet toward the machine-gun nests 
hidden in the woods, that are their special prey. 
Shells with a lurid, saffron -colored smoke — the new 
antitank explosive — began to burst over them, and 
I could plainly see the hail of molten lead that shot 
directly downward from the ball of ruddy smoke. 

While the battery of guns beside me kept up its 
infernal din, regular, sharp, deafening as the beats 
of giant sledge-hammers on an anvil, every once 
in a while a prodigious roar and rattling would pass 
overhead as a huge shell from the guns behind us 
cleft the air. As its shrill whistling died away a 

[ 167] 



THE AMERICAN EROXT 

inoinont later, a cloud of salmon-colored smoke 
mingled with debris and stones arose from the hill 
of Montfancon opposite, drifting away tinally on 
the afternoon breeze. The "big boy" had done 
his work. 

The day was filled with incidents. At one time 
I fonnd myself talking with Captain Homer St. 
Gandens. whom I had not seen since I discussed 
eamoutlage with him nearly a year before up in the 
Cornish Hills and who was wounded in the head 
only fifteen minutes after he left me. At another 
time my attention was attracted by the rare sight 
of a French colonel, whose blue uniform was con- 
spicuous among so much kliaki. and T watched the 
progress of our troops with him and heard his praise 
of them. He proved to be the Chief of Statf of Gen- 
eral Ciouraud's army, and with him was his liaison 
othcer. ]\Iajor Bryan, who afterward gave me a 
remarkable series of photographs of the most im- 
portant sectors of the American Front — pictures 
that I treasure highly as precious documents of the 
war. 

After months of peering through periscopes or 
peeping furtively over trench parapets, it seemed 

[ UvS 1 



BEFORE MONTFAUCON 

strange indeed to stand thus in the open and watch 
even a fraction — tliough it was an important one — 
of the greatest offensive in history. 

As the afternoon wore on I could see our infantry, 
supported by the tanks, work its way, despite the 
machine-guns, across the open spaces and finally 
penetrate into the Montfaucon Woods beyond, 
while, far over to the right, in front of Bethincourt 
and Le Mort-Homme, other regiments could be 
seen advancing — mere tiny specks. Quite near at 
hand, coming up over the crest of the hill on which 
I stood, our field-artillery was being brought up to 
support our advance. Under the wheels of guns 
and caissons the engineers were shovelling loose 
stone and ballast to keep the precious pieces from 
miring. Behind the artillery followed the ammuni- 
tion-trains and the quartermaster's vans filled with 
supplies — all the pressure of men and transport 
attacking in the open, converging from all sides upon 
Montfaucon, their main objective in this sector, the 
whole forming a panoramic picture we had never 
been able to see before in this war. 



[ 109 ] 



n 
THE ROAD TO VAREXNES 

NEXT dav we decided to go over into an- 
other sector and see what was happening 
on the road to Varennes, 
As far as Xeuvilly we had no difficulty, finding 
the roads quite free from traffic. Xeuvilly itself 
tempted us to linger, for it was verj' picturesque. 
Its ancient houses are, for the most part, of half- 
timbered construction, the spaces between the beams 
being filled in with plaster and mud spread on heavy 
laths. The concussions of the various bombard- 
ments had blown all this mud-fiDing out, so that 
only the timber-work was left to support the red- 
tiled roofs that remained fairly intact though the 
waDs that held them up were open to the four winds 
of heaven. 

In these airy billets, through which the cold au- 
tumn breezes swept at will, our men were quartered, 

[no] 



THE ROAD TO VARENNES 

gathered, with their animals, round fireplaces still 
intact but practically out-of-doors. 

A mile or two beyond Neuvilly we struck the 
traffic, a jam such as I had never seen before, the 
road for miles being blocked with a triple line of 
vehicles of every description. I saw colonels and 
even a brigadier-general on foot in the road, acting 
as ''traffic cops," directing, swearing, ** bawling out" 
every officer in sight, but the blockade never 
budged. 

It was a very serious matter, too, for the ammuni- 
tion couldn't get through to feed the guns up front 
nor could the wounded be brought back to the hos- 
pitals, while at any moment the enemy might open 
up his batteries on the congested road and do fear- 
ful execution. A regiment of negro engineers was 
hard at work strengthening the road, and as we 
sat in these serious surroundings that might at any 
moment become positively calamitous, the lilt of 
darky voices was ever in our ears, and this is what 
I heard come floating in the window: 

"Slow ! Ah should say he was slow; he's as slow 
as a snail ! You know 'bout de woman what had 
a sick husband and nobody to send for a doctor? 

[171] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

Well, she thought o' the snail an' she sent him off 
an' she waited for fo' year an' nobody came. So 
she went out to see what on earth had happened 
to de snail. She found him by the garden-gate, 
'bout half-way to the road, an' she said: 'You ole 
lazy animal ! Don't you know mah husband's sick 
an' dat I'se waited fo' years fo' de doctor? Get 
up an' hustle, you ole lazy thing; is this all the far 
you got?' An' de snail he looks up an' says: *If 
you don't quit your talkin', ah won't go at all !' " 

Finally, like the old woman, tired of waiting, we 
got out and went ahead on foot. Then we found 
the principal reason for the congestion in the road: 
a gigantic mine crater, more than a hundred and 
fifty feet long and forty wide, that completely cut 
the road in two. A new roadway was being made 
around it, but the artillery, in spite of straining 
horses and sweating men, was mired in it and could 
not be extricated, for the weather having changed 
the night before, the rain had softened the earth 
and made it spongy and slippery. 

Fields of wire, shell-holes filled with water, quag- 
mires, rank grass, and a few blasted trees — these 
were the objects that composed the tragic landscape 

[172] 



THE ROAD TO VARENNES 

across which, by muddy side-roads, Hke ants toward 
an ant-hill, crept long lines of horse-drawn vehicles, 
diminutive, almost lost in the vastness of the desert 
waste. Off to the east rose the sinister slopes of 
the Vauquois, denuded, stripped of their forests, 
ravaged and ploughed up by shells and high ex- 
plosives, with the old French and German first-line 
trenches running almost side by side up and over 
their summit. To the westward the heights of the 
Argonne, rocky and precipitous, succeeded each 
other, hill after hill, from the southern horizon to 
the northern, green and densely wooded, save for 
the portion that had lain so long between the enemy 
lines — the portion where the trees had been reaped 
as with a giant sickle, only the stumps standing 
like the stubble in a wheat-field. 

In the wopds to the north, dense and apparently 
so peaceful, the sharp voices of the machine-guns 
were incessant, plainly marking the area where our 
men were trying to clean out the treacherous forest. 
I watched some German prisoners dig a grave and 
bury one of their comrades on a hillslope while a 
sergeant read a simple prayer. 

Then I picked my way through the traffic on the 

[173] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

road until I reached the bridge before Boureuilles 
which the engineers had just finished repairing. 
As the result of incessant effort, the road had been 
cleared enough to permit the ambulances to come 
through filled with our wounded, quiet, courageous, 
after hours of waiting and exposure, some sitting 
up, others lying prone, motionless, with only a hand 
or foot, stained with blood, protruding from the 
army blanket that covered them. 

Boureuilles itself was razed to the ground and 
honeycombed with wrecked trenches, destroyed by 
our barrage and just abandoned by the enemy. 
Some of our tanks were still crawKng about it, 
moving farther up over the narrow-gauge tracks 
that afforded them better support than the road- 
way. 

Only two kilometres beyond Boureuilles lies 
Varennes, the old town in which Louis XVI, after 
he was recognized in Ste. Menehould by the dragoon 
Drouet, was arrested as he was attempting to escape 
into Germany, and taken back to Paris to be tried. 
Now the ancient place was smashed to bits. The 
fine old stone dwellings on its main street were but 
piles of broken rock; at a carrefour, a Virgin still 

[174] 



THE ROAD TO VARENNES 

stood in a blue niche, but the chapel that she be- 
longed to had completely disappeared. 

In a square some forty or fifty of our tanks were 
gathered, multicolored in their gaudy camouflage, 
wallowing around in the sticky mud, half hidden 
under the mangled trees that, clipped and prim, 
had once shaded the pretty flace. Our troops had 
just taken the town and had moved on a bit beyond 
it, but it was teeming with activity. The unburied 
dead lay in the streets. The dressing-stations were 
crowded and groups of prisoners kept filtering 
through on their way to the rear. The roar of the 
artillery was very close and sharp, and the rattle 
of the musketry and of the machine-guns over in 
the forest where the Seventy-Seventh was trying 
to dislodge the Boche was incessant and insistent. 

After its initial push forward, our Argonne offen- 
sive moved slowly, for it encountered the bitterest 
opposition. One hard fight succeeded another. 
Through one cold night after another our infantry 
camped in the open, wet and freezing, sheltered 
only by their pup-tents and exposed to a continuous 
harassing fire from the enemy's artillery. Slow and 
steady progress was being made, to be sure, but only 

[175] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

by "paying the price," for we were up against the 
main Hindenburg positions defended by picked and 
veteran troops. 

At the end of the first few days we went back 
to Rarecourt, where our First Army Corps had its 
headquarters, and I found shelter in a deserted room 
behind the Graves Registration Bureau (a cheerful 
neighborhood), a chamber devoid of any furnishings 
but containing a placard with a broken door 
from which various articles of feminine apparel — 
sordid dresses and hats trimmed with bedraggled 
feathers — insisted on emerging at most unexpected 
intervals. In this cheerful place I set up my cot 
(which, as the fine season was now over, I was be- 
ginning to use), and made myself as comfortable 
as the fireless fireplace and leaky ceiling would per- 
mit. 

And from Rarecourt I proceeded to make my 
various sketching trips. Rain and slush; mud and 
dirt; my paper wet and soggy, my hands numb with 
cold — these were the conditions, none too propitious 
for sketching, that obtained in the Argonne in Oc- 
tober. 

I spent a couple of soaking days in and around 

[176] 



THE ROAD TO VARENNES 

Montfaucon, drawing the remains of the formidable 
German defenses. From the shts of the P. C.'s 
I looked out over the grim wastes of Hill 304 and 
Le Mort-Homme and saw the same tragic land- 
scapes that the Kaiser and his son must have seen 
as they watched the heroic defense of Verdun. I 
ploughed through the mud that was ankle-deep in 
the old German trenches. Heavy clouds, thickly 
charged with moisture, drove low over the lofty 
hilltop and swept the ruined arches of the martyred 
church with their misty filaments. The clipped 
trees of the Place de I'Eglise, once neatly trimmed 
and umbrageous, now stood like charred skeletons, 
reaching out their bony arms, leafless and branch- 
less, in gestures of mute despair and ardent sup- 
plication. 

On other days, with Captain Duncan, I explored 
the woods and deep recesses round Very and Cheppy, 
veritable fortresses captured only after epic combats 
by the men of the Thirty-Fifth, who, under their 
baptism of fire, succeeded in driving the veteran 
Second Guard Division of Berlin from these strong- 
holds. 

Later, we pushed on as far as Cierges and Brieulles- 

[ 177] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

sur-Meuse, also scenes of fierce fighting, and up the 
valley of the iVire, following the slow progress of 
our troops as far as Apremont, Chatel-Chehery, 
and Exermont. But farther it was impossible to 
go, for, for a long time, that is until October 20, 
the advance of our army was checked along this 
line by the obstinate defense of the main German 
positions in the Argonne, the pivotal hinge upon 
which the safety of their entire line depended, the 
vital spot that must be defended to the very last. 
And when under our pressure it did break, their 
whole line crumbled and the war was at an end. 



[178] 



Ill 
THE ARMISTICE AND SEDAN 

CE in October the "flu" laid me low, and 
at the end of the month I was sent down 
to Fontainebleau for a period of rest and 
convalescence. And that is why I was in Paris and 
not at the front for the signing of the armistice. At 
the time I regretted that this was the case, but now 
I am glad that I lived through those two wonderful 
days in Paris. 

I came up to the city on Sunday, the 10th, fully 
realizing what was going to happen. The boule- 
vards were thronged with a great calm crowd. I 
took a seat in the afternoon on the terrasse of the 
Cafe de la Paix. At the tables about me were of- 
ficers of every one of the allied nations: French, 
American and English, Portuguese, Canadians and 
Australians; Serbs, Belgians, Poles, and Italians. 
The civilians were dressed for the most part in black 
or sombre colors but not in mourning. Venders 

[179] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

with push-carts filled with flags were doing a thriv- 
ing business, but there was otherwise no outward 
sign of excitement. 

The Place de la Concorde presented a more stir- 
ring spectacle. Coj^sevox' horses and figures that 
stand at the entrance to the Tuileries Gardens and 
the Champs Elysees, precious works of art that had 
been protected by sand-bags during the bombard- 
ments, were now further embellished with strings 
of Boche helmets that hung over them arranged 
in symmetrical designs. The terraces that over- 
look the Place were lined with captured planes 
of every type and description — Fokkers, Rumplers 
and other Taubes, and the big black Gothas and 
bombing-planes that had terrorized Paris at night 
for so long a period. Around the obelisk and the 
fountains that decorate the centre of the square, big 
guns of all calibers, trophies of the last offensives, 
pointed their grim noses toward heaven, encircled 
by armies of smaller pieces — 37s, 77s, trench-mortars 
and minnemccrfcrs — over which the children were 
climbing and sporting. A dense crowd packed the 
square, gazing with evident satisfaction at these 
varied trophies, and especially at the captured tank, 

[180] 



THE ARMISTICE AND SEDAN 

decorated with its Iron Cross, that stood at the 
entrance to the Tulleries Gardens. The statues of 
LiUe and Strasbourg, so long in mourning, were now 
gayly decorated with flags and wreaths. 

On the following morning, Monday, the 11th of 
November, I stepped out on a balcony near the 
Arc de Triomphe and beheld the city lying spread 
beneath me, its familiar domes and towers — the 
Pantheon, the Invalides, Notre Dame, Sacre Coeur — 
plainly visible though enveloped in a bluish mist. 
In a hospital yard just below some wounded sol- 
diers were playing at ten-pins. Otherwise there 
was no sign of war, and the streets were as quiet 
as they had been during the last few weeks. 

The morning paper brought no definite news. A 
little later I went down-town and to the office of 
my department in the Rue Ste. Anne. There I was 
told that the armistice had been signed at 5 a. m. 
and was to take effect at eleven. I looked at my 
watch. It stood at eleven -ten. The war was over ! 

When I went out into the street again, the news 
was just leaking out. An American officer was plac- 
ing flags on Fremiet's statue of Jeanne d'Arc that 
stands before the Red Cross Headquarters in the 

[181] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

Rue de Rivoli; the Place de la Concorde, centre of 
all Paris excitements, was fast filling with a joyful 
crowd and with students singing before the statue 
of Strasbourg. In the Rue Royale, flags, held in 
readiness, were appearing at every window as if 
by magic. 

We took a table for luncheon by the window of 
a restaurant fronting on this street. Next to us 
sat six French ofiicers watching the growing crowds 
as intently as we were. A troop of chasseurs d'Afrique 
came up the street mounted on x\rab horses — "du 
Fromentin," as one of the French oflScers expressed 
it — looking exceedingly picturesque in their pale- 
blue tunics and red fezes, with their captain salut- 
ing at their head and bowing to the acclamations 
of the people. Grizzled veterans, in battered hel- 
mets and uniforms faded by years of campaigning, 
were singled out of the crowds, hoisted on youthful 
shoulders and, drapeau en tete, borne careering down 
the boulevard. Others seized the smaller cannon 
from the Place de la Concorde and, cheering, pushed 
them through the crowd. 

American motors and camions, filled with dough- 
boys clinging on like bees in a swarm, came roaring 

[182] 



THE ARMISTICE AND SEDAN 

down the street, back-firing with a noise like giant 
mitrailleuses. The crowds grew ever denser and 
soldiers, soldiers were everywhere. I distinctly 
remember one group: an Australian, a *' Tommy," 
a French sailor, a Yank, and an Italian, arm in arm, 
each carrying the flag of his own country, an in- 
spiring sight, a living picture of *'Tlie Allies." Fac- 
tory girls and midinettes mixed freely with the men 
and were hoisted bodily upon the motor-trucks that 
now were wreathed with swathes of bunting, not 
draped with care, but thrown loosely round the 
unwieldy vehicles piled high with soldiers, the top- 
most man holding a big flag aloft, that the breeze 
held stiff and taut. Then some Australians came 
down the boulevard headed by their band. 

Ah, the music, that was what was needed — what 
we wanted ! But there was little of it and little 
cheering — and no brazen noises like those we make 
at home. Underlying the joy that the long night- 
mare was over, I distinctly felt an undercurrent of 
sadness, pain at the thought of all the dear ones 
who were gone forever and could not be there to 
share the hour of rejoicing; vivid recollections of 
years of anguish that could not be dimmed even in 

[ 183 ] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

this, their hour of triumph. And when, as I saw on 
several occasions, a group of wounded came along — 
grands blesses from the Paris hospitals, armless, 
legless, or sightless — the crowd opened reverently 
and silently, and with respect made passage for 
them to pass. 

We made our way up the jammed boulevard and 
stepped out upon the balcony of a big office that 
we know that fronts on the Place de TOpera. The 
brown-gold trees, the gray houses, and the Opera 
itself, with Carpeaux's Dance hidden behind sand- 
bags covered with war posters, served as a back- 
ground to a solid mass of humanity, black for the 
most part, but thickly sprinkled with spots of blue 
and khaki, jostling, joking, good-humoredly push- 
ing, seething up from the Metro like ants from 
an ant-hill. Motors, ambulances, and buses slowly 
and painfully pushed their way through, but the 
crowd that, grudgingly, opened to afford them pas- 
sage, closed behind them again like a river behind 
a moving barge. 

Then, suddenly, we heard a mighty humming 
in the air and a great Handley-Page came sailing 
majestically overhead. In an instant a clamor arose 

[184] 



THE ARMISTICE AND SEDAN 

and the whole place turned pink as every face in 
the crowd was turned upward to watch the great 
bird fly magnificently across the sky. . . . 

On the day following the signing of the armistice, 
I returned to General Headquarters, where I found 
that the joy attending this great event was not as 
great as might have been expected, and for reasons 
easy to guess. 

Anxious to visit and sketch the scenes connected 
with the last combats of the war, I set out a few 
days later with Captain Andre Smith for Clermont- 
en-Argonne and thence to Varennes. From this 
point we followed up the valley of the Aire, this 
time passing through Chateau Chehery, and on to 
Fleville and St. Juvin, that we had been unable to 
reach before. All these places had suffered severely 
in the recent fighting, as the Americans had slowly 
pushed up on one side of the Argonne while the 
French pushed up on the other, squeezing the Boche 
and his machine-guns out of the depths of the forest, 
and aiming to effect their junction at Grandpre, a 
considerable town situated at the extreme north 
end of the Argonne Forest. 

[185] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

As we approached Grandpre, the deadly effects 
of our tierce barrage as weU as the accuracy of its 
aim were everywhere apparent. The fields at each 
side of the road were pockmarked with shell-holes 
often so close together that they overlapped, yet 
the road itself was almost unmjured, spared to allow 
our advancing columns to utihze it. 

The outskirts of the town were smashed to pieces, 
where the Germans had put up their mam defense. 
But in the place where our camions were standmg 
the houses were less injured and the conspicuous 
church spire rose intact above them. 

^^^len we asked for a billet we were told to choose 
an\i:hing that we could find, so picked out an airy 
chamber with three good walls, doorless and partly 
roofless in the Kronprinzstrasse. for all the streets 
still bore their German names. The wind was sharp 
and chill: the air damp and cold. We went to mess 
at the "chateau." an ugly modern viUa of some 
pretention, and foimd our otficers gathered there for 
supper in the open i, there being no room in the 
house), their only shelter a tarpauUn under which 
the wind howled and whistled at will. 

"We all giilpt?d down our meal as quickly as pos- 

[ISG] 



THE ARMISTICE AND SEDAN 

sible, for the food chilled in an instant. Opposite 
me sat a French civilian who, they told me, had ar- 
rived that afternoon to dig up some money and 
valuables that had been buried in the garden 
when the villa was abandoned four years before. 
When this man found that I could speak French 
(none of the other officers had happened to be able 
to do so) he fairly exploded, all his pent-up feelings 
bursting forth in a perfect torrent of words. 

He was, it seemed, the owner of this Villa Mar- 
guerite, and this was his first visit to it since he left 
it in 1914. It had meanwhile been an important 
German Headquarters and, though battered by 
the recent bombardment, was in fairly good con- 
dition. The Boches had systematically robbed it 
of everything, even including most of the furniture, 
"modern stuff," its proprietor remarked rather dis- 
dainfully, *'but," he added gleefully, "they left 
two splendid ancient armoires, treasures that I 
specially prized, the only really valuable pieces of 
furniture that I possessed. Ah, vraiment. Us rimit 
aucun gout, ces Boches I'^ 

After supper, as we were sitting round the hot 
stove in the dismantled living-room, trying to warm 

[187] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

our chilled bones, one of the officers asked him if 
he would like to see the abri that the Germans had 
dug in his garden. *'^/i, oiii,^' indeed he would, 
and, excited again, he was led down into the cellar 
where a crowd of negro pioneers were huddled round 
a stove. As we passed the broken door of the wine- 
cellar which the Germans had cleaned up years be- 
fore, he said, with a sigh, *'If only my cellar were as 
it once was, I could warm you with some of the best 
wine in France.'* 

A door opening from a dark corner led us into a 
passage about eighty feet long, neatly boxed in with 
planks, and this passage was prolonged by another 
even longer, running at right angles to it, and then 
by a third about fifty feet long. This last terminated 
in a lofty undergTound chamber, faced up with brick, 
some twelve feet square and about thirty feet high, 
roofed, they told us, with six feet of concrete. Niches 
were arranged in its walls for cots and certainly, 
in them, even under the heaviest bombardments, 
officers could sleep in peace and safety. 

As we opened the door into it, six big negroes 
sprang to their feet. The table before them was 
absolutely empty; a single candle showed only their 

[188] 



THE ARMISTICE AND SEDAN 

rolling eyes and glistening teeth and their hands 
raised to their foreheads in salute. "Craps," said 
the officers. A lieutenant, without a word, seized 
the candle, snuffed it, put it in his pocket, and we 
left the culprits to grope their way back in the 
darkness. 

Our host was evidently delighted with this under- 
ground chamber, with this latest addition to his 
property. "What a souvenir of the war !" he cried, 
"What will my wife say when I show it to her — 
and my friends.'^" And later he remarked reflec- 
tively, "I'm glad the Americans gave me back my 
home. I am very grateful and shall always cherish 
their souvenir. This afternoon I found the graves 
of two of your men down by the little stream below 
my house. I shall always care for them as if they 
were the graves of my own sons; they shall never 
lack for flowers." 

When we returned to our airy billet it was freez- 
ing, and when we looked out in the early morning 
the streets were coated with thick ice and the wheel- 
tracks glistened like bands of polished steel. A bit- 
ing north wind added to the discomfort and chilled 
the hot cakes at breakfast before we could get them 

[189] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

into our mouths. It was the first real touch of winter 
and the negro troops looked as unhappy as they 
doubtless felt, stamping their feet and slapping their 
sides in their efforts to keep up a circulation. 

Our purpose that day was to go as far north as 
we could and see the extreme limit attained by our 
troops — the culmination of their superhuman efforts 
in the Argonne — and reach, if possible, Sedan, the 
historic place that had spelled "defeat" to the 
French in 1870 and "victory" in 1918. 

We had read in the papers that the Americans 
had taken Sedan the day before the armistice was 
signed, so expected, of course, to find it filled with 
our soldiery. By the map we had only forty-five 
kilometres to go. So we took it leisurely at first, 
stopping in Buzancj' to sketch the crossroad that 
had been such an important centre behind the Ger- 
man lines, and that still was marked with all its 
great sign-boards. 

Thence we proceeded by a lonely road through 
the Forest of Dieulet, that had figured so prominently 
in the latest communiques, and that was torn and 
lacerated by shell-fire. At La Besace we made a 
detour through the icy streets to avoid an enormous 

[190] 



THE ARMISTICE AND SEDAN 

mine-crater that blocked the road. Tenaciously we 
kept on, despite a road furrowed by the heavy traffic 
of the retreating Germans, then frozen by the biting 
north wind, until we reached Raucourt, where a 
regiment of French Colonials were marching through 
the town — the first troops we had seen since leaving 
Buzancy. 

From Raucourt we followed down a pretty little 
valley that led toward the Meuse. White flags were 
nailed to the church-towers and to the tall factory 
chimneys. The villagers who had remained in their 
homes during the long German occupation came 
to their doorways as they heard the sound of our 
motor, and watched us curiously as we went by. 
But the road itself was absolutely deserted, except 
that, here and there, we met a family group pushing 
a baby-carriage or a small cart filled with their scant 
belongings, as they returned to homes that had been 
abandoned years before. Beyond Remilly's pic- 
turesque church, we could look down into the Meuse 
Valley. But at the bottom of the hill, where the 
road we had been following joins the main highway 
that skirts the river, a huge chasm yawned before 
us, another mine-crater whose explosion had shat- 

[191] 



THE AMERICAN EROXT 

tered all the houses round about and splashed their 
ruined walls with cuts and bruises made by fly- 
ing fragments of molten lead. A French engineer 
pointed out a detour through the fields, and, after 
some difficulty, we found ourselves on the main 
road along the river. 

From here on our progress was very slow. Everv' 
few hundred yards a mine-crater would block us 
and we had to look for a way around. The tele- 
graph wires were down and at times got tangled 
in our wheels; the poles lay in the road. But we 
managed to keep on, even getting by the d^Tiamited 
railway-crossing at Pont Maugis. Across the river 
lay Bazeilles and Balan, and beyond them we could 
now plainly see our goal, Sedan. 

But just beyond Wadelincourt, as the road en- 
ters the suburbs of the city, we came to a last 
raihoad crossing, and here an obdurate French sen- 
tinel halted us. We showed him our papers, but he 
said that absolutely no one was allowed to pass and, 
in reply to a question, informed us, to our great 
surprise, that no troops, either French or American, 
had yet entered the city. 

For further information he referred us to his 

[ 19-2 ] 



THE ARMISTICE AND SEDAN 

captain. So we returned to Wadelincourt and the 
captain said that we must see his colonel, who was 
over in Frenois. 

The road over there, which was little more than 
a field path, led up and over the heights that lie 
to the south of Sedan, heights that command a vast 
panorama. We stopped on the summit to contem- 
plate this view, so full of tragic memories. It is of 
course the city that first fixes the attention, its mas- 
sive citadel and big public buildings standing out 
prominently from the compact mass of its houses. 
It lies in a cup-like valley, backed by the first wooded 
heights of the Ardennes, and it was in this valley 
that the French Emperor with his whole army was 
trapped and captured at the end of the battle that 
virtually closed the war of 1870. Toward the east. 
La Moncelle and Daigny mark the positions of the 
French right wing, while Illy and Iges mark its 
centre and left. The Germans had crossed the 
Meuse at Donchery to the west, and had occupied 
these very heights of Frenois, from which their artil- 
lery commanded the city and the rear of Napoleon's 
army. The French defended themselves heroically. 
But when the Saxons and Prussians effected a junc- 

[193] 



THE AMERICAX FRONT 

tion at Illy and closed tbe ring of iron round the 
French., there was no help for it, and the Emperor 
and his army, outgeneralled and hopelessly out- 
nmnbered, were obHged to smrender. Napoleon FEI 
handed his sword to the King of Prussia down in 
the Chateau de Belle\'ue at the foot of the hill, 
caught at least like a man at the head of his army 
— not sneaking like a cidprit into neutral terri- 
ton' I 

Such, for the French, are the tragic memories 
that cluster round Sedan. That is why its name 
has been a s^^lonym for defeat and revenge; that 
is why such importance was attached to its capture 
in this war. 

Just how histon- will eventually record this cap- 
ture, I cannot say. Several versions already exist 
in the American army: other versions are current 
among the French. The sentrA-'s information that 
no troops had yet entered it, though it had been 
"captured" about a week before, was indeed siu-- 
prising. 

So it was with some curiosity that I sought out 
the colonel who, it seemed, alone had the power to 
allow us to enter the city. I found him in a modest 

[194 ] 



THE ARMISTICE AND SEDAN 

peasant's house in the Httle village of Frenois, busily- 
dictating orders in a back room. He seemed sur- 
prised to see me and at first, I know, was going to 
refuse my request, but when I had explained to him 
our special mission, he wrote in his own hand, down 
in the corner of my orders, an "authorization to 
enter Sedan." 

Armed with this, we returned toward the city, 
though by a different road from the one by which 
we had first approached it. A sentry posted at the 
railroad crossing stopped us again and, doubting 
the validity of our pass, called his sergeant, who, 
in turn, called his lieutenant and he, recognizing 
his colonel's signature, gave an order, the road gates 
opened, and we started down a tree-shaded avenue 
toward the city. 

The faubourg was hung with flags — not flags such 
as one might ordinarily see, but pathetic flags that 
had lain hidden in cellar or garret for years, mingled 
with others of a home-made variety, French flags, 
stitched together clandestinely in back rooms with 
reds and blues of varying intensity, British flags 
of strange design and, most touching of all to me, 
American flags, presumably copied from photographs, 

[195] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

for their starry fields ^Ye^e out of all proportion and 
tlieir red stripes were very often black. 

Crossing the river and the island, we entered the 
Place de Tiirenne and drew up beside the statue 
of the great Marshal of France, a native of the town. 
The square was quiet and almost deserted. A few 
people came to look at us and our big motor cur- 
iously and one elderly man, in well-brushed but 
antiquated clothes, raising his watery eyes to mine, 
a^ked pathetically: "When are the French coming 
in ? We need them. We have neither heat nor 
food." 

A long line of abandoned cannons were ranged 
befoi-e the two big buildings that had been, one a 
Soldatenheim, the other an Officers' Club, during 
the German cx^cupation. At one end of the square 
stood the Hotel de Ville and. adjoining it. at the 
bridge-head, the German generals had estabhshed 
their Konmiandantur. 

We went to the City Hall to ask for a room in 
which to open our cots, but were told by the Com- 
missiiire de Police in person that we should need 
no bedding rolls that night. And forthwith we were 
taken over to an imposmg house not far away and 

[19G] 



THE ARMISTICE AND SEDAN 

given two large connecting rooms on the ground 
floor, facing a little square, through which, we were 
told, the French troops would pass on the morrow. 

For it seemed that the French were to enter the 
city at daybreak. 

When Sedan was directly threatened by the Amer- 
icans, the Germans agreed to surrender the city 
intact provided they were allowed to withdraw un- 
molested. This they had done about a week ago 
and, the armistice intervening, no other troops had 
as yet entered the city, which had lain meanwhile 
in a sort of neutral territory. The people were with- 
out coal and almost without food. Luckily we had 
brought a few canned things with us and these we 
shared in the kitchen of the house (the only room 
that could boast even a trace of heat) with the woman 
who kept it, she providing some camomile tea, whose 
warmth was comforting and grateful. 

Her story was an unusual one. She had come 
up from Paris at the beginning of the war to see 
her husband, who was mobilized near Sedan, and 
she had been caught there by the tide of ad- 
vancing Germans. It was found out that she had 
kept a hotel in Paris, so she was ordered to organize 

[ 197 ] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

and direct this rooming-house for officers, In return 
for which service she had been treated with a cer- 
tain amount of consideration, though her tribula- 
tions had been many. Up to the last few weeks 
the officers had seemed happy enough. Then the 
communiques had very evidently been tampered 
with and then they ceased altogether. In the hall- 
ways she heard loud words and altercations and 
the soldiers saying to their officers, "We won't go 
any further; the war's over for us." Then the com- 
manding general came to take up his residence in 
her house, his quarters by the bridge-head being 
untenable, as the mined bridge might be blown up 
at any moment. He sat most of the time with his 
head in his hands, silent and dejected. Then came 
the sound of distant shots that steadily grew nearer. 
Then a day of anguish. Then calm again; and 
presently the hated Germans packed up their kits 
and departed, leaving the town to its civilian pop- 
ulation. 

Before daybreak, on the morning following my 
arrival in Sedan, that Is on Sunday, the 17th of 
November, I was awakened by a sound I had been 
listening for even in my sleep: the clatter of horses' 
hoofs on the paving-stones, and, looking out, I could 

[198] 



THE ARMISTICE AND SEDAN 

see dim shapes moving along, the eclaireurs or cavalry 
patrols that precede advancing troops, the only 
things clearly visible being the sparks struck by 
the horses' shoes and the matinal cigarettes that 
twinkled in the men's mouths. 

The advance-guard came through about a half- 
hour later, and by that time I was standing with 
the crowd in the Place de Turenne. For here the 
townspeople had gathered, excited, expectant, to 
watch wistfully for the division that was to follow, 
waiting to see once more the beloved faces of the 
poilus, the uniforms of Frenchmen, after so many 
months of having the arrogant Prussian striding 
through their town. 

And as we stood there together I heard the same 
sort of stories that I had heard before at St. Mihiel: 
the same tales of mute suffering, of the haughty, 
overbearing officers; of girls ordered to report at 
certain places at midnight; of underfed men obliged 
to work overtime at hard labor. And when I asked 
them where they got their food and clothing, "WTiy, 
from America," was their reply, for they had duly 
received their share of America's generosity for the 
inhabitants of the invaded regions. 

At eight o'clock an aviator came swooping over 

[199] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

the Place *' doing stunts," flying so low that he al- 
most touched the roof-tops, then circling round 
again and attempting to calculate the distance even 
closer. 

The cheers that greeted him had scarcely died 
away when we heard the sound of music — the 
stirring notes of the "Sambre et Meuse," that march 
of all marches appropriate to the time and place, 
and at the far end of the bridge could see a solid 
column of horizon-blue. Nearer and nearer came 
the music, more and more distinct the clear voices 
of the bugles. A thrill went through the crowd. 
Tears welled to their eyelids and their faded faces 
were absolutely transfigured, as they saw again, 
after all their years of suffering, their own brave 
soldiers, victors at last after four years of heroic 
struggles. 

The band swung by. Behind it rode the general 
of the division — the gallant Sixty -First of Gouraud's 
famous Fourth Army — in his field uniform, but 
wearing his parade cap encircled with its double 
bands of golden oak leaves. As his horse's hoofs 
left the bridge and touched for the first time the 
paving-stones of the historic city, his hand went 

[200] 



THE x\RMISTICE AND SEDAN 

up to his hcpi but, instead of saluting, he Hfted 
it from his head with a broad and handsome gesture 
and swung it out at full arm's length, holding it 
thus as he rode bareheaded through the cheering 
crowd and on through the streets of the city as far 
as I could see. 

Tramp, tramp, tramp, behind him, came the 
rhythmic cadence of the marching feet — the regi- 
ments passing in close formation. No parade step; 
no glittering new uniforms. Only the faded coats 
and the battered steel helmets; the marching kits 
and the heavy packs and the guns held high and 
tipped with their murderous bayonets. Regiment 
succeeded regiment, each followed by its field and 
combat train and by the batteries of soixante-quinzes, 
an army on the march, businesslike and grim, still 
intent on the pursuit of a retiring foe. 

Finally the rattle of the last field-kitchen died 
away and silence settled again over the delivered 
city. The people looked at each other, exchanged 
a few words and faded away into their homes. A 
young French ofiicer turned to me and said: *'You 
Americans have certainly added a glorious page 
to your history in the taking of Sedan." 

[£01 ] 



VII 
WITH THE ARMY OF OCCUPATION 



I 
INTO LUXEMBOURG 

THERE seemed but one more important thing 
for me to do in connection with my work 
for the War Department, and that was to 
follow our Army of Occupation to the Rhine. 

But before doing this I decided to motor from 
Sedan back by way of the valley of the Meuse through 
another region that had been an important American 
sector during the last days of the war. At Dun- 
sur-Meuse we stopped to say good-by to some friends 
in the Forty-Second, that was just preparing to 
move up toward Germany as well as to sketch the 
picturesque old fortress-town that lay half along 
the river and the Canal de I'Est and half perched 
high above, clustered round an ancient church, that, 
a conspicuous landmark far and wide, tops a steep 
isolated hill. 

Crowds of prisoners returning from Germany 
were passing through the town: Russians, Eng- 

[205 ] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

lish, Italians, French. Some were trudging pain- 
fully along, tired, weak, and hungry; others had 
been picked up by our trucks and were being whirled 
they knew not whither, but little did it seem to matter 
to them so long as they were headed toward France. 
They were dressed for the most part in tatters — 
some in the uniforms that they had worn when cap- 
tured; others in the cast-off dress clothes of the Ger- 
man army that had been discarded at the beginning 
of the war. All had their stories written on their 
faces. The fresh and ruddy-cheeked men had in- 
variably been captured recently; the wan and ema- 
ciated faces, some of them quite heart-breaking to 
look at, belonged to men who had been suffering 
long years of captivity. The British, I thought, 
looked worst of all. 

From Dun to Verdun we passed again through 
that terrifying country that had been ravaged and 
desolated by four years of constant combats. 
Brieulles, Brabant, Samogneux, Regneville, Vach- 
erauville — so many ruins. Bras and Charny wiped 
from the map. At the last-named places we en- 
tered the ring of fortresses that surround Verdun — 
the famous circle that the Germans penetrated but 

[206] 



INTO LUXEMBOURG 

never broke, for its watchword was the defiant "They 
shall not pass." 

The terrible Cotes du Poivre and de Froide Terre; 
the blasted valley, the dead and withered hillsides 
that had reverted to lunar solitudes; the dugouts, 
muddy, soaked and beaten by the elements; the 
camouflaged emplacements for the heavy guns; the 
trenches winding interminable, like mole tracks, 
up and down and over the tops of the hills; a few 
scattered stumps of trees standing in acres and acres 
of wire entanglements — these composed the sinister 
landscapes that finally terminated at Verdun, lying 
smashed but undaunted, behind its ring of hills. 

Along the way we had seen but few soldiers. But 
Verdun itself was alive with poilus and Yanks, and 
we found to our great surprise, quartered in the 
famous citadel, our own department of G. H. Q., 
G 2-D. So for a day or two we remained in the 
city, sketching its ruined streets, its cathedral and 
the battered Bishop's Palace that adjoins it, sleep- 
ing and taking our meals in the citadel, a veritable 
underground city, capable of housing two divisions 
in its mess-halls, kitchens, dormitories, assembly 
rooms, and cinemas. 

[207] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

Wlien we had gathered as much information as 
we could as to the future movements of our army, 
we returned to Neuf chateau to get ready for our 
long trek to the Rhine. 

We started on that memorable journey on No- 
vember 24th, proceeding by way of Toul and Pont- 
a-Mousson, at which place we stopped for a time 
to sketch the town and its defenses that we had 
never been able to see before. Then we crossed 
the Moselle by the temporary wooden bridge that 
fills the gap made by dynamiting the old stone struc- 
ture, whose parapets were still strongly defended 
by the gabions and wattled revetments placed there 
at the beginning of the war. 

Turning northward we proceeded through what 
had always been a No Man's Land, dangerous and 
difficult of access. Now its undefended trenches, 
its deserted roads with their elaborate camouflage 
already tumbling down, its abandoned fields of wire 
and trous de loup plainly told the story that the war 
was at an end. 

At Vittonville all the signs became German and 
just beyond it we crossed the border into the old 
province of Lorraine that had been wrested from 
France in 1870. 

[208] 



INTO LUXEMBOURG 

At Jouy- aux -Arches we had a puncture and 
stopped the car to repair it under the tall arches 
of the Roman aqueduct that Drusus built to supply 
Divodurum (Metz) with water. 

It was very cold and I was stamping my feet on 
the stone pavement to warm them, when a door 
opened behind me and I heard a voice say "Come 
in and get warm." Turning my head, I perceived 
a toothless old woman, bent and rheumatic, bowing 
and smiling invitingly. I went in and she placed 
me a chair by the stove, from whose oven she ex- 
tracted a hot brick which she wrapped in some sack- 
ing and put under my feet. 

"Ah, monsieur," she said, "how happy I am to 
see you ! How much we owe to you Americans ! 
For nearly fifty years we French of Lorraine have 
groaned under the German yoke. I was a girl when 
we were separated from our own country, and my 
husband and I, all our lives, have prayed to be de- 
livered. He always said, *The day will come,' and 
he believed it. But alas, he passed away last year 
just before his prayers were answered — died of priva- 
tions. Could he but have lived to see this day ! He 
would have died so happy." And she went on to 
tell me of their suffering so near the front and to 

[209] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

show ino her single bit of black bread, hard as a 
bullet and dark in color as a chocolate cake, that 
nevertheless had been parsimoniously measured out 
and rationed to each inhabitant. 

The tall arches of the old Roman aqueduct that 
towered above her humble cottage were decked 
with flags and bunting, and at the entrance to each 
village, as we proceeded, floral arches had been 
erected, bearing messages of welcome: "Honor to 
the Allied Armies," "Hail to our Victorious Troops," 
"Vive la France ! Vive I'Amerique !" 

At the entrance to the suburbs of Metz stood a 
larger and more pretentious arch, and the streets 
of the faubourg were thickly studded with flags, 
many of them of that same home-made variety 
that I have described at Sedan. 

We lunched in a hotel that fronts on a Place where 
some huge German Emperor laj' prone upon the 
ground, crumpled imder the weight of his great 
bronze horse, hauled from the pedestal that stood 
empty beside him. The main square of the city, 
in front of the majestic Cathedral, was packed with 
throbbing French army motors and filled with of- 
ficers in horizon-blue, one of whom pointed out to 

[ ^210 ] 



INTO LUXEMBOURG 

me a statue of the Kaiser, standing in a niche on 
a buttress. William II, in his presumption, had 
caused it to be erected in place of one of the prophet 
Daniel and it now wore manacles, and was dec- 
orated with the inscription, "Sic Transit Gloria 
Mundi." 

Our next objective was Thionville, a considerable 
town, surrounded by foundries and situated in the 
very heart of the great Lorraine iron -mines. We 
had some difficulty in finding the road to it until 
we remembered that its German name was Dieden- 
hofen ! On this, the first Sunday of its occupation, 
its streets were gay with bunting and packed from 
curb to curb with French soldiers, laughing, joking, 
talking, and walking arm in arm with the comely 
girls of Lorraine, who had donned for the occasion 
their brightest and prettiest national costumes. 

The roads outside the city were teeming with 
American divisions on the move, coming up from 
the Bassin de Briey and from Longwy to take up 
their positions along the Luxembourg frontier. Our 
headquarters were then in Luxembourg itself and 
to this city we now proceeded. 

Wlien we entered the animated capital of the 

[211] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

Grand Duchy we found its streets packed with a 
Sunday throng — a crowd so dense that it seemed 
as if the entire popuhition of the city had poured 
itself into the one broad main street. There was a 
hberal sprinkHng of khaki in the crowd but most 
of our troops were quartered outside of the city in 
towns scattered along the roads that led toward 
the German frontier. Though the national flag 
was everywhere in evidence and though most of 
the shop-windows displayed colored prints and post- 
cards of the faces of all the Allied rulers or mili- 
tary commanders, nowhere could I discover a por- 
trait of the grand duchess. 

Neither the city nor its people, to the casual ob- 
server, showed any trace of damage or suffering. 
They seemed in fact to have benefited by some special 
dispensation, the city having been reserved, I fancy, 
as a permanent sort of rest area for the German 
officers. AYe supped that night in the white-and- 
gold dining-room of the principal hotel. Civilians, 
handsomely dressed ladies, well-trained young waiters 
serving excellent though expensive food, were unusual 
and surprising sights. Though there were many 
American officers in the room, it was really a ''peace- 
time dinner.'* 

[ ^^^^^ ] 



INTO LUXEMBOURG 

Afterward we went to the Casino or club. All 
Luxembourg was there, all Luxembourg in the demo- 
cratic sense. The cafe was packed; up-stairs there 
was music and dancing. I watched the crowd with 
the greatest interest, for the German physiognomy- 
was everywhere apparent and the whole atmosphere 
of the place was distinctly "Boche," resembling in 
every particular some German Verein In East Fifty- 
Ninth Street. Yet by word and action the people 
were receiving us with open arms, happy, they said, 
to be freed from German rule and assuring us re- 
peatedly that no Prussian officer had ever been ad- 
mitted within the precincts of this club. Many of 
the men were wearing bits of red ribl)on in their 
buttonholes to show their republican beliefs, and 
when I questioned them they all professed strong 
pro-French sympathies. 

For several days we lingered about the city which 
is exceptionally picturesque, especially those parts of 
it called the Grund and the Pfaffenthal, that lie in 
a profound valley worn by the Alzette as it makes 
its way through the hills that are crowned by the 
massive ramparts of the Oberstadt or old town. 

We also visited the areas about the city that were 
occupied by the American troops, which had, by 

[213 ] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

now, moved up and ^yere taking their positions along 
the Sure and Moselle from Diekirch to Sierck, there to 
await the order to cross the frontier into Germany. 

From Diekirch eastward down the valle\" of the 
Sure we found the Marines quartered in all the 
villages and their sentries, doubled, patrolling the 
river bank, keeping an ever-watchful eye upon the op- 
posite shore, where the German sentinels were plainly 
visible. Here and there we passed picturesque httle 
groups, assembled round camp-fires, trying to keep 
themselves warm, for the air was wet and cold. And 
I remember being struck by the sight of an officer's 
tunic hanging over a chair by a window with the 
second gold chevron newly sewed on, the right to 
wear it having just been attained by the Second 
Division. 

Around Echternach we found our friends of the 
Thirty-Second with one of their P. C.'s estabhshed 
in the spacious courtyard of the old Benedictine 
Abbey that is the chief architectural adornment of 
the town. The stone bridge across the Sure was 
guarded by a strong detachment surrounded by a 
crowd of admiring youngsters. 

Following down the river a little farther, we reached 

[ ^^1-i ] 







"I 



■«ess- 






INTO LUXEMBOURG 

Wasserbilllg, where the Sure joins the Moselle to 
form the greater stream whose valley was to be our 
main road to Coblenz and the Rhine. Large black 
letters on a sign-board, "Trier 13 km.," tempted us 
sorely to cross the bridge and go on into Germany, 
but the bridge guards would never have allowed 
us to pass and we could still see German sentinels 
patrolling the opposite bank. 

Ascending the Moselle we found the First Divi- 
sion billeted in the villages all the way to Remick. 
Their guard patrols were drilling on the little tongues 
of land spotted along the river; their artillery was 
parked in the fields; their horses were being watered 
and cared for. The peasants looked on apathetically, 
I thought, and seemed even a bit hostile, for, I be- 
lieve, they and the clergy who dominate them still 
adhered at that time to the grand duchess's party. 

By the end of November our troops were all in 
position, their transport had moved up and every- 
thing was in readiness for their advance into Ger- 
many. All that was lacking was the order from the 
High Command for the Allied Armies of Occupa- 
tion to move forward in unison across the German 
border. 

[215] 



II 
TO THE RHINE AND BEYOND 

THAT order finally came and a few days later 
we crossed the Sure at Wasserbillig, where 
the sign-post had tempted us before, and 
in a short half-horn* were motoring through the 
streets of Treves, having our first glimpse of Ger- 
many in war-time. 

The flags and arches that had greeted the retiring 
German army had entirely disappeared. All looked 
strangely normal and peaceful. ^Ye were shown to 
good rooms, comfortably heated, at the Porta Nigra 
Hotel. Our windows overlooked the great black 
arch begun by Caesar in the first century, but never 
completed — one of the most remarkable Roman re- 
mains north of the Alps, for Augusta Trevirorum 
was so important a colony that the Emperors them- 
selves at times came to live in it, a fact to which 
the ruins of their palaces and baths still testify. 

[ '216 ] 



TO THE RHINE AND BEYOND 

During the days that followed the Great War, 
Treves was again to take an important place in his- 
tory and receive hosts of distinction. First our own 
American advance G. H. Q. moved up to it and 
used it as its headquarters. Then Foch himself 
came here to meet the German delegates and precise 
and affirm the exact terms and prolongations of the 
armistice, so that the city became the centre of the 
network that controlled the Allied Armies of Occu- 
pation. 

As I have said, it had remained quite normal. 
After supper, a simple and breadless meal, I took 
a walk about the city. Its shops were brightly lighted 
and filled with attractive wares. The people looked 
neatly dressed though their shoes were not of leather. 
Though but a few miles from the border, all seemed 
so tranquil, so undisturbed that my gorge rose with- 
in me as I walked down street after street, where 
handsome houses stood intact, their windows fresh- 
ly curtained, their door-steps neatly swept, and I 
thought of all the devastation that I had seen, of 
the sufferings that I had witnessed, of the homes 
systematically robbed and pillaged, and in my mind 
I contrasted the forlorn refugees wandering they 

[217] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

knew not whither with these smug middle-class 
people who even now were strumming their pianos 
and singing in their comfortable homes. 

We only spent one night in Treves, for we were 
anxious to reach Coblenz next evening, it being the 
goal of our ambition, the city whose name to the 
Americans spelt "victory," its occupation bringing 
our troops into the very heart of the enemy's coun- 
try. 

As far as Wittlich we followed a broad highway 
that had been very badly cut up by the iron-tired 
trucks of the retiring German army. The inhabi- 
tants stood in their doorways, silent, furtively watch- 
ing us as we passed. The children, on the contrary, 
dashed out from doors and alley-ways, and, at the 
risk of their lives, boisterously greeted the honk- 
honk of our horn. 

Every little while we would overtake one of our 
marching columns — sometimes a battalion of in- 
fantry, swinging along in columns of four, with only 
their light equipment upon their backs and looking 
their very best in brand-new uniforms; sometimes 
a battery of field-artillery with its glistening guns 
no longer camouflaged, its animals well-groomed, its 

[218] 



TO THE RHINE AND BEYOND 

standards, uncased, flapping gayly in the breeze; 
sometimes a quartermaster's outfit with its mule- 
drawn wagons covered, Hke the prairie-schooners 
of other days, with new canvas tops and followed 
by a jangling array of freshly painted water-tanks 
and field-kitchens. For the entire equipment of 
our Army of Occupation had been renewed through- 
out, and was now well calculated to impress the 
people of the occupied region. 

For hours we wriggled past these moving columns, 
noting, on the men's left shoulders, either the bright 
red arrow of the Thirty-Second or the T. O. of the 
Ninetieth. Posters marked with the same em- 
blems, pasted on trees and walls, indicated the road 
to follow and guided us finally to Alf, where we found 
ourselves upon the banks of the Moselle again. 

From here on the road skirted the river, which, 
in its many windings, had greatly widened. The 
hills on either hand rose higher and more majestic, 
their purple flanks ribbed and striped with gray 
stone walls that shore up the terraces whereon grow 
the Graachers, the Piesporters, and the other wines 
for which the valley is famous. The villages too 
grew older and more picturesque as we descended 

[219] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

the river. In Bremm a painter could linger for 
weeks; Beilstein has been pictured on canvas and 
in engravings for centuries; while, as a climax to 
these scenes of more intimate charm, Cochem's 
fantastic outline suddenly appeared silhouetting the 
battlements and towers of its ancient Schloss against 
the sky. 

Down both banks of the river our troops were 
pouring, diminutive, interminable caravans, strange- 
ly dwarfed by the majesty of their surroundings. 
At a point somewhat below Cochem we were obliged 
to take oiu* motor across the river on a ferry, a slow 
but amusing operation that delayed us until four 
o'clock. We now found ourselves in the full tide 
of the First Division, the unit that was advancing 
in the lead and was to be the first to enter Coblenz. 
For some distance beyond Treis we continued to 
pass its regiments, marching stolidly along, weary, 
though they woidd not admit it, plodding doggedly 
on toward the ultimate goal. 

When we had at last passed the foremost battalion 
with its major marching at its head, the road opened 
clear before us, and for the last twenty kilometres 
or so we speeded up with nothing at all to stop us. 

[ -2-0 ] 



TO THE RHINE AND BEYOND 

At the entrance to the city we were halted by 
two American sentries who carefully examined our 
papers; a moment later we were again stopped by 
a mounted captain, who politely informed us that 
no one was allowed to enter the city but G 2-D, but 
that, luckily, meant us. So, without any further 
trouble, we now found ourselves gliding down the 
quiet streets of Coblenz. Only one American de- 
tachment had as yet entered the city — a battalion 
that had been sent in ahead to guard the stores, 
motor-trucks, and rolling stock that were being 
turned over by the Germans according to the terms 
of the armistice. 

We were assigned to rooms in the Coblenzerhof, 
a handsome new hotel that had been finished just 
before the war, and that our army had taken over 
as its permanent headquarters. There were as yet, 
however, only a dozen officers in it — members of a 
special mission, headed by Colonel Ray, that was 
arranging matters connected with the occupation. 

The Coblenzerhof stands on the Rhine Quay di- 
rectly facing the Bridge of Boats. My room was 
on the third floor and its windows and balcony com- 
manded an extensive view up and down the river. 

[221 ] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

Opposite, rose the precipitous heights of Ehren- 
breitstein, crowned with its grim old fortress. Up 
the river the gardens of the Kaiserin Augusta An- 
lagen extended for nearly a mile, while toward the 
north, at the confluence of the Moselle and the Rhine, 
on a tongue of land, quite sacred to the Teuton heart, 
called the Deutsches Eck, I could just see, half hidden 
by the houses of the quay, the colossal Denkmal or 
monument erected to the memory of the first German 
Emperor, builder of the empire, founder of the proud 
dynasty of the Hohenzollerns, William I, Prince of 
Prussia, who here in Coblenz, one of his favored 
Residenzstadts, matured the plans for his new Prus- 
sian army. 

And now the mighty strength of that formidable 
army and of that empire that was builded upon 
the theory that might makes right was gone and 
broken forever, and on the quay below me I saw 
sentries in kliaki from far-away America guarding 
the bridge-head over the Rhine in the name of 
liberty, justice, and humanity ! 

As I left my room with these thoughts in my mind 
I saw, in the dimly lighted hall, an officer coming 
toward me, a slender, youthful figure that I took 

[222] 



TO THE RHINE AND BEYOND 

naturally for that of an American. But a character- 
istic cHck of the heels and the automatic salute be- 
trayed at once his nationality, and I reahzed that 
I had passed a German. When I went into the din- 
ing-room I found quite a group of them, officers 
who had been left behind to arrange matters with 
our mission. 

I learned that evening that the First Division 
was to enter Coblenz at about noon on the morrow. 

Promptly on the hour the heads of the columns 
appeared at the upper ends of the various main 
thoroughfares and silently but steadily poured down 
into the very heart of the city. Most of the inhabi- 
tants remained indoors with their windows tightly 
closed and the few that were walking in the streets 
went indifferently along without as much as turn- 
ing their heads to look at the marching regiments, 
acting, in fact, as if American troops moving through 
their town were an e very-day occurrence. 

The main columns halted and formed by bat- 
talions in two squares that open in front of the 
Schloss or Royal Palace, a favorite residence of the 
Empress Augusta until her death. Here, as well 
as in other squares about the city, the soldiers stacked 

[223] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

their arms, unslung their packs, and settled down 
to a much-needed rest. 

The field-kitchens began to smoke and the smell 
of "slum" and hot coffee filled the air. What the 
marching troops — the entrance of an Army of Oc- 
cupation into their city — had failed to do, these 
culinary odors accompHshed. First the children, 
then the housewives, drawn by these odors as if 
by irresistible magnets, began to issue from the 
houses, gathering furtively at first, then more and 
more boldly, around the steaming wagons. Sen- 
tries with fixed bayonets good-humoredly but firmly 
tried to keep them back, calling out in stentorian 
voices, "Get back there. Keep off," and the like. 
The soldiers fined up w^ith their mess-kits, then, 
when these were filled, went off to sit in the grass 
or along the stone copings, to eat their food, sur- 
rounded by envious crowds, gazing longingly at the 
savory stew, the steaming hot coffee, and the thick 
slices of white bread that the men were only too 
inclined to share with the children. 

Though tinged with a distinct touch of humor, 
the picture was in the main a pathetic one, telling 
its tale of months of privation. 

[224] 



TO THE RHINE AND BEYOND 

On the day following the entrance of the army 
into Coblenz we made a trip up and down the Rhine 
as far as the American sector extended, that is, thirty 
kilometres northward to Sinzig and thirty kilometres 
southward to St. Goar. Our sentinels, doubled, as 
we had seen them on the Sure and Moselle along the 
Luxembourg frontier, were now patrolling the left 
bank of the Rhine, across which as yet no troops 
had moved. 

The majestic river, scene of so much history, so 
many legends dear to the Teuton heart, seemed 
saddened in the cold gray light of mid-December. 
From crag and hilltop its storied castles looked 
down: Schloss Hammerstein, Schloss Rhelneck, 
seat of the von Bethmann-Hollwegs; the Stolzen- 
fels, commanding its vast panorama up and down 
the ancient waterway; the Marburg, most Imposing 
of all the Rhenish strongholds, poking its towers 
and battlements Into the very clouds themselves; 
the "Hostile Brothers," the "Cat and Mouse,'* and 
Rheinfels grouping themselves about St. Goar in 
one of the most romantic stretches of the river, and 
the Lorelei Itself, centre of song and legend, rising 
gray and grim out of the silent river. 

[225] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

But now no pleasure-parties, no tourist caravans 
were visiting these historic scenes. Instead, the 
towns and villages were filled with khaki, with sol- 
diers that had poured down through the rugged 
hills of the Eifel from Daun and Prlim, and through 
the valley of the Moselle to add a chapter to the 
history of the Rhineland that never will be dear 
to the hearts of future Teuton generations. 

I witnessed the crowning event of that chapter 
of history next morning, the morning of the 13th 
of December. 

Just before dawn I heard a sound I had been 
listening for: the sound of shuffling feet on the 
wooden Bridge of Boats below my window, and, 
looking out, could see, in the first dim light of day, 
a long yellowish serpent crawling slowly across the 
bridge. Longer and longer this serpent grew, until 
its head had disappeared under the railroad viaduct 
on the opposite bank of the river. Yet its sinuous 
body, bristling with guns and plaited like chain 
mail with steel helmets, kept ever wriggling and 
writhing across the river. Tramp, tramp, tramp, 
went its thousands of marching feet — but no other 
sound broke the stillness of that early morning. 

[226] 




■ - '•. —HI 



First Americans Crossing the Rhine 

first American trofjps crossed the Rhine just after flayl>reak on the Bridge of Boats 

at Cohlenz 



TO THE RHINE AND BEYOND 

This was but the beginning — the advance-guard — 
of what went on for days as our army crossed the 
Rhine to occupy the bridge-head beyond. 

Toward nine o'clock I saw the first American 
flag go over. The morning was gray and misty with 
a drizzhng rain. The heights of Ehrenbreitstein 
were wrapped in mystery. The river flowed sullen 
and leaden, and the khaki-clad columns mingled 
with this general grayness. Then, against all this 
monotony of tone, there appeared a radiant object — 
a brilliant spot of red, white, and blue, edged with 
its golden fringes, the silken regimental colors of 
the infantry, "Old Glory" triumphant, carrying its 
message of humanity and justice to the peoples 
beyond the Rhine. 

Could only all those who had made sacrifices at 
home, all those who had come over to France to 
help make this victory possible, all those who had 
given their lives even for the cause, have lived to 
see this moment, they would not have considered 
that they had lived or died in vain. 

For hours I watched the columns moving on over 
the Schiffbriicke; it seemed as if I could never see 
enough of them. The townspeople too had now 

[227] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

come out and were standing along the curbstones 
frankly admiring the splendid appearance and equip- 
ment of our men. "How young they look; how 
handsome!" I frequently heard about me. How 
strong too — that army that their leaders had as- 
sured them would never cross the seas, and, even 
if it did come, would only be fitted for labor and 
not for years be ready for combat. 

Yet upon its flags could now be inscribed the 
names of many a glorious victory: Cantigny, Bel- 
leau, Chateau-Thierry, St. Mihiel, and the fierce 
battles in the Argonne. 

These were the flags that now were crossing the 
Rhine. My last journey took me over with them, 
through the crowded roads, to sketch the towns 
across the river in which our men were to be billeted 
in quaint half-timbered houses Hke those in old Ger- 
man woodcuts, and especially to see Montabaur, a 
highly picturesque town in the centre of the bridge- 
head that the First Division was using as its head- 
quarters. When this work was finished I returned 
to Coblenz, ready to go back to Neufchateau. 

But before I left I saw one final picture — a pic- 
ture that will five in my memory as long as I five. 

[ 5^23 ] 



TO THE RHINE AND BEYOND 

I had changed hotels and was now at the Monopol 
that fronts on one of the city's most important 
squares. Breakfast was served in a room that faces 
the street, and is on a level with it, separated from 
it by only a sheet of glass hung with flimsy muslin 
curtains. A group of German officers occupied the 
table next to us — a different group than I had seen 
before — several junior officers and a major, the latter 
a typical rigid martinet of the type that we associ- 
ate, and rightly, with the worst of Prussian mili- 
tarism. 

We were about to begin our meal when an in- 
fantry column came down the street and just as 
it reached the window at which we sat the band 
at its head struck up a stirring and triumphant Sousa 
march. One of the younger German officers im- 
pulsively jumped up and, with boyish curiosity, 
held back the muslin curtain the better to see the 
American troops. Their colonel rode by at the head 
of his regiment, and then came the Stars-and-Stripes 
again, uncased, flaunting its bright folds in the fresh 
morning breeze. 

I watched the Prussian major's face and it well 
repaid my scrutiny. From a deadly pallor it turned 

[229] 



THE AMERICAN FRONT 

pink, and then, as the blood mounted to it, crimson, 
until I thought he would be seized with a stroke of 
apoplexy. Every muscle was tense and rigid, but 
he never moved, remaining still and silent, with 
folded arms, watching. My cup of happiness was 
full. I had seen a typical Prussian officer humiliated 
in the heart of his own country. 



[230] 



H65 89 ..Ki 



y 
^\'^ 






^^^ 



%> 



~%P' 




